Iran in Its Intricacy

March 5, 2010
By ROGER COHEN
PARIS — A year has passed since President Obama’s groundbreaking Nowruz offer to Iran of engagement based on mutual respect. Iran is now a different country, its divided regime weaker and confronted by the Green movement, the strongest expression of people power in the Middle East and a beacon for the region.

Obama’s outreach has achieved this: the unsettling of Iran’s revolutionary power structure. That alone was worth the gambit. But the 31-year gridlock in Iranian-American relations endures. Sarah Palin, no less, is now urging Obama to “declare war on Iran” to save his presidency. She’s not alone. Daniel Pipes, the conservative commentator, called a recent National Review column: “How to save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran.”

There’s nothing new in U.S. hawks reducing Iran to a nuclear abstraction, its 70 million citizens subsumed into a putative warhead, its civilization ignored and its historical grievances against the United States glossed over — all in the name of making Persia a U.S. electoral pawn and a threat that demands bombs.

But the war option remains unthinkable, a potential disaster for the United States and Israel. It’s therefore worth outlining, before the drumbeat intensifies in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, 10 truths about Iran.

1.Iran’s hardliners thrive on isolation. The game-changing pursuit of dialogue with Iran is not incompatible with support of the Green movement; rather it complements that backing.

Obama must denounce the rape-and-repress post-election crackdown and speak out for Iranians’ right to peaceful protest even as he seeks to overcome through negotiation the poisonous U.S.-Iranian psychosis. Engagement brought us further in one year than axis-of-evil U.S. grandstanding did in seven.

As Andrew Parasiliti of the International Institute for Strategic Studies has said, “Engagement with Iran is a piece of the process for change in Iran — not a detriment to it.”

2. The Iranian response to Obama has been erratic, not least in the aborted Geneva deal of Oct. 1, 2009, that would have seen Iran’s low enriched uranium (L.E.U.) shipped out the country and the eventual return of uranium enriched to 20 percent (well below weapons grade) for use in a Tehran medical research reactor.

The crumbling of this accord, victim of Iran’s political divisions, left Obama and his top Iran aides bitterly frustrated. They are to this day. It would have created breathing space for broader talks.

But Iran says the idea is alive: “We think all parties have shown their political will to fulfill this exchange” (Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Feb. 5). Or: “We are ready for a fuel exchange within a fair framework. We are still ready for an exchange, even with America” (President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Feb. 16).

Skepticism is in order given Iran’s track record, but if the aim is to get the L.E.U. out of Iranian hands and into safe hands — Japan’s perhaps, or that of the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) — maximum flexibility should be deployed. This deal is still a door opener. Sanctions are a cul-de-sac.

3. Deterrence is powerful. The United States should, as Hillary Clinton has suggested, be building a “defense umbrella” for friendly gulf states alarmed by Iran’s nuclear program. The cleverest remark of Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Iran was: “The only way you end up not having a nuclear-capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons.”

No better way to ensure that exists than beefing up military assistance to Iran’s neighbors. Remember, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, is the “Guardian of the Revolution.” Job No. 1 for him is preservation. Iran will not build a bomb — forbidden by his own fatwa — if convinced its price is the revolutionary regime itself.

4.Sanctions will not alter Iran’s policy, and will further enrich the Revolutionary Guards who control sanction-circumventing channels from Dubai, but they will buy some time for further probing of engagement.

I’m told that’s how Obama, who remains intellectually committed to the idea of an Iran breakthrough, views them: a necessity in the light of Congressional and Israeli pressure, but not a likely means to get sanctions-inured Iran to change course.

It’s interesting that Clinton is now talking of sanctions in the “next several months” rather than 30 to 60 days. That’s encouraging. New sanctions, to which China will pay no more than lip service, equal old failure.

5.Attacking Iran has known consequences. Saddam Hussein did so in 1980 — and thereby cemented Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution by uniting diverse factions (socialist, liberal and others) in national defense.

Because the United States and Europe armed Iraq in that war, and Saddam then gassed the Iranians, resentment runs deep: I’ve often been shown war wounds in Tehran on arms and legs as a single word is uttered, “America.” The generation of young officers in that war, like Ahmadinejad, now runs Iran and constitutes the New Right. (Blowback is not limited to Afghanistan.) But most Iranians are under 35 and drawn to the United States.

The one sure way to defeat the Green movement, frustrate Iranian youth, unite Iranians in patriotic defiance, reinforce the New Right, put Iran on a crash course to a bomb, and buttress the regime — as in 1980 — is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Gates has said, “There is no military option that does anything more than buy time” — and not much, at that.

6.Iran’s defiance of U.N. resolutions to cease enrichment and its pattern of concealment have, as the International Atomic Energy Agency recently noted, raised concerns about possible “past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile.”

Still, I.A.E.A. inspectors are in Iran, inspections are vigorous at the Natanz plant, everything there is tagged, Iran is a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty and U.S. intelligence still holds that Iran has not made the decision to build a weapon.

It remains unclear whether Iran is in the nuclear ambiguity or much riskier nuclear weapons game. But it is clear that there is still time — at least a couple of years — for a bargain that would persuade Iran to do what Brazil, Argentina and South Africa did before it.

7. The shifts since the June 12 elections are seismic. A vicious clampdown has estranged millions of Iranians from the regime, creating a situation not unlike Poland’s in the 1980s. This does not mean change is imminent. It does mean the theocracy faces a people who have seen through it. As the Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo of the University of Toronto told me, “Violence equals moral and political weakness.”

If restiveness spreads to the Labor movement, as in 1979, or the anger of the religious establishment in Qom escalates, all bets are off. Iran is far more volatile than a year ago. I doubt that it could manage a peaceful transition were Khamenei, 70, to die.

The West, with its historical debt to Iran, owes it to the Iranian people not to surrender to feel-good punitive impulses that will only undermine a centennial struggle for some form of representative government.

A post-zealous Iran that has no illusion about Islamism — been there, done that — is one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East precisely because the struggle between God’s authority and the people’s is being played out daily. Most Iranians want normal relations with the world, above all.

8.Israel and Iran are not neighbors. Both are strangers — one Jewish, the other Shiite — in the Sunni Arab sea that is the Middle East. They have never fought a war. They enjoyed everything short of diplomatic relations under the shah and productive relations for a decade after the revolution, when Israel sided with Iran against Iraq. Their enmity is fierce but not inevitable.

For Israel, already at war with Arabs, opening a new war front against Persia would be disastrous: Muslim anger would overflow. Hezbollah and Hamas would do their worst. Nobody in the Islamic world would distinguish between Israel and the United States, straining Israel’s most important alliance and leaving Obama’s outreach to Muslims in shreds. Israeli security would not be advanced; it would be undermined.

U.S. security and the American quest for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan would be compromised. Israel can prevent an Iranian bomb through working with America on measures short of war. Its own large nuclear arsenal and second strike capacity gives it the assurances it needs to pursue that course.

9.A peaceful Iraq, a quieter Afghanistan and any Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement demand Iranian involvement. Outside the tent Iran is a disruptive force. Inside the tent it can help America on multiple fronts and outgrow its violent revolutionary impetuosity. That’s still a game-changing proposition, as radical as the U.S.-China breakthrough of 1972 that changed the world. Obama must shut out the baying crowds and focus on the prize.

10.Iran is the original Heartbreak Hotel. It crushes people with its tragedy. Since at least the 1930s it has veered between forced westernization (“westoxification” to its critics) and theocratic imposition, banning the hijab and then making it compulsory, reaching for pluralism and then crushing it, opening its society and then slamming it shut.

Now, in 2010, a reformist movement, often led by brave women, trying to chart a middle course — true to Iran’s Shiite faith but also to its republican instincts — has been bloodied before our eyes. Classical Shiism envisages secular governance on earth not the now bankrupted rule of a purported representative of the Prophet.

It is time. It is time for Iran to find the balance between faith and pluralism that has eluded it for a century. It is time for the United States to help Iran’s emergence from isolation — not with Palin’s jingoism, nor empty punishments, nor bombs — but through firmness allied to creative diplomacy and sustained involvement.