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ESSAYS AND SPEECHES Give Diplomacy a Chance January 30, 2005 By Abbas Milani and Michael McFaul
Even when the European-Iranian agreement to halt
Iran’s uranium-enrichment program looked solid, the United States was
blunt in its disapproval. The ink was barely dry on the accord when the
Bush administration, it appears, began trying to derail it.
First, rather than endorse the accord, Secretary of
State Colin Powell essentially accused the
Iranians of lying when they said that their nuclear program was for peaceful purposes. He announced that new intelligence
showed Iran is developing a nuclear warhead to
arm its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Then, at a
November 20, 2004, meeting of heads of state in Santiago, Chile, President Bush stated unequivocally that Iran is trying to build a
nuclear weapon.
Why would the administration take such a combative
stance? Because hard-liners within the administration thought that Tehran
would use the settlement to buy time for building nuclear weapons and that
the United States would be better off bombing Iran’s suspected
weapons sites.
Proponents of using military force against Iran have
not yet won the argument within the Bush administration. But the past weeks
of strong pronouncements about the threat Iran poses suggest that the
military option may be gaining ground.
Iran’s last-minute antics, in trying to continue some forms of enrichment, almost
derailed the agreement, but eventually the Islamic
Republic agreed to a full, albeit temporary, moratorium.
Before the United States even considers such a drastic
step as airstrikes against suspected nuclear weapons sites—or trying
to compel the United Nations to endorse new economic sanctions against
Iran—it is essential that our leaders be clear about what they are
trying to accomplish in Iran and whether such actions will help or hurt.
If the ultimate goal is to create a
democracy—one that would not fear the United
States and therefore have less use for the bomb—then dual-track
diplomacy with Iran’s government and its people is more likely to
work than military action.
Probably the most important question the
administration’s leaders should ask
themselves is whether Iran, even a nuclear-armed Iran, poses a direct
threat to the United States and its allies. The answer, we believe, is no.
The mullahs who rule Tehran long ago gave up their ideological quest to
“export” revolution. Like the last generation of octogenarians
who ruled the Soviet Union, Iran’s leaders today want nuclear weapons
as a means to help them preserve their power, not to spread their model of theocratic
rule to other countries.
Deterrence Works
In other words, even if Iran’s rulers succeeded
in building nuclear bombs, they would be very unlikely to take on the
United States and its vast nuclear arsenal or to attack Israel. (The
mullahs in Tehran understand that any nuclear attack against Israel would
trigger full retaliation from the United States.) In dealing with Iran,
deterrence works.
Tehran would also be unlikely to pass a bomb to
Islamist terrorists, despite its support
of Arab terrorist organizations that continue to attack Israel. One reason,
again, is deterrence. Iran’s rulers know that the United States would
probably be able to trace the weapon back to them and retaliate.
The threat of a nuclear Iran comes, instead, from the
reaction it is almost sure to spark in the region and the world, possibly
sending Egypt and Saudi Arabia on their own quests for nuclear weapons.
Such an arms race would undermine the
long-standing Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, an agreement signed by nearly 190 countries,
which has proved indispensable in preventing the
spread of nuclear weapons.
Bush administration hard-liners want to save that arms
control treaty by using arms. In advocating a “surgical” military strike
against Iran’s most important nuclear facilities, including the once
hidden enrichment plant in Natanz, they cite Israel’s airstrike
against Iraq’s nuclear complex at Osirak in 1981 as a model of
success. They argue that an American (or Israeli) strike would not end
Iran’s nuclear aspirations but dramatically slow its program and make
the mullahs reconsider the costs of trying to restart it.
Attack Would Backfire
But a preemptive military strike would instead do just
what the hard-liners in Tehran hope for: It would unite their people behind them. Even
a precise bombing campaign would kill
hundreds if not thousands of innocent Iranians; destroy ancient
buildings of historical and religious importance; trigger an Iranian
counterstrike, however feeble, against American targets and friends in the
region; and spur the mullahs to increase direct support of American enemies
in the Shiite part of Iraq.
Even more important, an attack would only encourage
Tehran to redouble its efforts to build a bomb,
just as Saddam Hussein sped up his efforts after the 1981 strike. It would
also hurt the democratic opposition movement inside Iran, which is already
in retreat and cannot afford another setback. After an attack, Iranians,
not unlike Americans, are sure to rally around the flag and their
government.
If the administration decides, in the end, that
American military options are limited and counterproductive, the only
serious way to impede the development of Iranian nuclear weapons is through
negotiation. Iran’s recent accord with France, Britain, and Germany
is only temporary, and negotiations are expected to continue. In the last
few weeks, new stages in the negotiations have
begun—this time focusing on the economic incentives for Iran. If the United States were
to jump in now, it could try to ensure that our
European allies accept nothing less than a permanent and verifiable
dismantling of Iran’s enrichment capabilities, as well as banning
any plutonium production.
Allowing the Iranians to enrich even some uranium,
which they say will be used merely to feed their nuclear power plant, makes
it too easy to cheat. To make the deal work, the United States would need
to join with Europe, Russia, and China in pledging to guarantee Iran a
permanent and continuous supply of enriched uranium. To make the deal even
more attractive, the fuel could be offered at reduced prices.
Even under the strictest inspection regime,
Iran’s leaders will cheat, as they have
often done in the past, and will eventually divert enriched uranium from
peaceful to military purposes. But the harder and more transparent the allies can make the process, the longer it will take
Iran to begin building bombs.
In the long run, the world’s only serious hope
for stopping Iran from developing nuclear
weapons is the development of a democratic government in Tehran. A democratic Iran will become an ally of the Western
world and no longer need a deterrent threat against the United States.
Democracy in Iran therefore obviously serves
U.S. national interests. Yet Bush administration officials (as well as
their predecessors in the Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations) have not succeeded
in developing a strategy for advancing the
cause of Iranian democracy.
New Strategy
What is needed is a radical new approach that would
nurture change from within the country, in alliance with Iran’s
democratic movement, rather than impose change from without.
A first step would be to establish an American
presence in Tehran, as many in Iran’s democratic opposition have
proposed. Now decades old, the U.S. policy of isolating Iran has not
weakened but instead strengthened its autocratic government. Of course, we
are not suggesting that the United States open an embassy in Tehran and
turn a blind eye to human rights abuses; that would only further
consolidate the mullahs’ hold on power. But
we are suggesting a new strategy that would allow American government officials, as well as civic leaders, academics, and
businesspeople, to engage directly with Iranian society.
This engagement cannot occur on a widespread scale
without some level of diplomatic relations and some revision of the
American sanctions against Iran. Were those to occur, more Western
foundations would be able to make grants to pro-democracy Iranian
organizations, while businesspeople—especially the Iranian-American
business community in the United States—would be able to leverage
their capital and know-how to influence economic and political change
inside Iran. A U.S. presence in Iran would, not incidentally, also enhance
the West’s ability to monitor Iran’s nuclear program.
Critics of engagement argue that diplomatic relations
with Iran will reward this “axis of
evil” member for years of supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear
weapons. In fact, an American presence in Iran is the mullahs’ worst
nightmare. Iran’s government has long used its ongoing tensions with
the United States, as well as the embargo, as an excuse for the economic
difficulties that are, in fact, the direct results of the regime’s
incompetence and corruption. Tehran’s leaders have conveniently
labeled nearly all their opponents as “agents of America.”
Most important, part of the regime’s
self-declared legitimacy lies in its claim to
be the only Muslim country fighting what it sees as U.S. imperialism. If
the United States could prove it’s not an enemy of the Iranian
people, the legitimacy of Iran’s leaders would diminish.
Reagan’s Course
In the first years of his presidency, Ronald Reagan
labeled the Soviet Union the “evil empire” and went out of his
way to avoid contact with such a regime. Over time, however, Reagan charted
a new course of dual-track diplomacy. He engaged Kremlin leaders (well
before Gorbachev) in arms control and also fostered contacts and
information flow between the West and the Soviet people in the hope of
opening them up to the possibilities of democracy. In the long run, it was
not arms control with the Soviets, but democratization within the Soviet
Union, that made the United States safer.
If George W. Bush desires a foreign policy legacy as
grand as Reagan’s, now is the time to think big and change course as dramatically as
Reagan did.
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