[Marxism] NYT: "Have we already lost Iran?"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24leverett.html

May 24, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
Have We Already Lost Iran? 
By FLYNT LEVERETT and HILLARY MANN LEVERETT
Washington

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed. On its
present course, the White House's approach will not stop Tehran's
development of a nuclear fuel program - or, as Iran's successful test of a
medium-range, solid-fuel missile last week underscored, military capacities
of other sorts. It will also not provide an alternative to continued
antagonism between the United States and Iran - a posture that for 30 years
has proved increasingly damaging to the interests of the United States and
its allies in the Middle East.

This judgment may seem both premature and overly severe. We do not make it
happily. We voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and we still want him to succeed
in reversing the deterioration in America's strategic position. But we also
believe that successful diplomacy with Iran is essential to that end. Unless
President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally
different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough.

This is a genuine shame, for President Obama had the potential to do so much
better for America's position in the Middle East. In his greeting to "the
people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran" on the Persian New Year
in March, Mr. Obama included language meant to assuage Iranian skepticism
about America's willingness to end efforts to topple the regime and pursue
comprehensive diplomacy.

Iranian diplomats have told us that the president's professed willingness to
deal with Iran on the "basis of mutual interest" in an atmosphere of "mutual
respect" was particularly well received in Tehran. They say that the quick
response of the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - which
included the unprecedented statement that "should you change, our behavior
will change, too" - was a sincere signal of Iran's openness to substantive
diplomatic proposals from the new American administration.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is backing away from the bold steps required to
achieve strategic, Nixon-to-China-type rapprochement with Tehran.
Administration officials have professed disappointment that Iranian leaders
have not responded more warmly to Mr. Obama's rhetoric. Many say that the
detention of the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi (who was released
this month) and Ayatollah Khamenei's claim last week that America is
"fomenting terrorism" inside Iran show that trying to engage Tehran is a
fool's errand. 

But this ignores the real reason Iranian leaders have not responded to the
new president more enthusiastically: the Obama administration has done
nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized
program, begun in President George W. Bush's second term, to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Under these
circumstances, the Iranian government - regardless of who wins the
presidential elections on June 12 - will continue to suspect that American
intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile.

In this context, the Saberi case should be interpreted not as the work of
unspecified "hard-liners" in Tehran out to destroy prospects for improved
relations with Washington, but rather as part of the Iranian leadership's
misguided but fundamentally defensive reaction to an American government
campaign to bring about regime change. Similarly, Ayatollah Khamenei's
charge that "money, arms and organizations are being used by the Americans
directly across our western border to fight the Islamic Republic's system"
reflects legitimate concern about American intentions. Mr. Obama has
reinforced this concern by refusing to pursue an American-Iranian "grand
bargain" - a comprehensive framework for resolving major bilateral
differences and fundamentally realigning relations. 

More broadly, President Obama has made several policy and personnel
decisions that have undermined the promise of his encouraging rhetoric about
Iran. On the personnel front, the problem begins at the top, with Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton. As a presidential candidate, then-Senator Clinton
ran well to the right of Mr. Obama on Iran, even saying she would "totally
obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel. Since becoming secretary of state,
Clinton has told a number of allies in Europe and the Persian Gulf that she
is skeptical that diplomacy with Iran will prove fruitful and testified to
Congress that negotiations are primarily useful to garner support for
"crippling" multilateral sanctions against Iran. 

First of all, this posture is feckless, as Secretary Clinton does not have
broad international support for sanctions that would come anywhere close to
being crippling. More significantly, this posture is cynically
counterproductive, for it eviscerates the credibility of any American
diplomatic overtures in the eyes of Iranian leaders across the Islamic
Republic's political spectrum. 

Even more disturbing is President Obama's willingness to have Dennis Ross
become the point person for Iran policy at the State Department. Mr. Ross
has long been an advocate of what he describes as an "engagement with
pressure" strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should
project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader
regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the
Islamic Republic. 

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama's election, we asked him if
he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from
Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he
advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail?
Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program,
at some point in the next couple of years President Bush's successor would
need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past
"diplomacy" would be necessary for that president to claim any military
action was legitimate. 

Iranian officials are fully aware of Mr. Ross's views - and are increasingly
suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one
senior Iranian diplomat said to us, "an offer we can't accept," simply to
gain international support for coercive action. 

Understandably, given that much of Mr. Obama's national security team
doesn't share his vision of rapprochement with Iran, America's overall
policy is incoherent. For example, while the administration recently
completed a much-ballyhooed review of Iran policy, it has made no changes in
its approach to the nuclear issue. Administration officials argue, with what
seem to be straight faces, that the Iranian leadership should be impressed
simply because American representatives will now show up for any nuclear
negotiations with Iran that might take place.

Similarly, some officials suggest that the administration might be prepared
to accept limited uranium enrichment on Iranian soil as part of a settlement
- effectively asking to be given "credit" merely for acknowledging a
well-established reality. Based on our own experience negotiating with
Iranians, and our frequent discussions with Iranian diplomats and political
figures since leaving the government, we think that it will take a lot more
to persuade Tehran of America's new seriousness. 

Tehran will certainly not be persuaded of American seriousness if Washington
acquiesces to Israeli insistence on a deadline for successful American
engagement with Iran. Although the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, had
told reporters that no such deadline would be imposed, President Obama
himself said, after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel, that he wants to see "progress" in nuclear negotiations before the
end of the year. He also endorsed the creation of a high-level
Israeli-American working group to identify more coercive options if Iran
does not meet American conditions for limiting its nuclear activities.

More specifically, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Ross have been pushing the
other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany
to intensify multilateral sanctions against Iran if Tehran has not agreed to
limit the expansion of its nuclear-fuel cycle program by the time the United
Nations General Assembly convenes in New York at the end of September.

This diplomatic approach is guaranteed to fail. Having a deadline for
successful negotiations will undercut the perceived credibility of American
diplomacy in Tehran and serve only to prepare the way for more coercive
measures. Mr. Obama's justification for a deadline - that previous
American-Iranian negotiations produced "a lot of talk but not always action
and follow-through" - is incorrect as far as Iranian behavior was concerned.
For example, during talks over Afghanistan after 9/11 in which one of us
(Hillary) took part, Tehran deported hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban
operatives who had sought sanctuary in Iran, and also helped establish the
new Afghan government. It was Washington, not Tehran, that arbitrarily ended
these productive talks. 

Beyond the nuclear issue, the administration's approach to Iran degenerates
into an only slightly prettified version of George W. Bush's approach - that
is, an effort to contain a perceived Iranian threat without actually trying
to resolve underlying political conflicts. Obama administration officials
are buying into a Bush-era delusion: that concern about a rising Iranian
threat could unite Israel and moderate Arab states in a grand alliance under
Washington's leadership. 

President Obama and his team should not be excused for their failure to
learn the lessons of recent history in the Middle East - that the prospect
of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab
publics and that even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation.
The notion of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is
not only delusional, it would leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese
tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their
resolution in free fall. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful
American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.


Why has President Obama put himself in a position from which he cannot
deliver on his own professed interest in improving relations with the
Islamic Republic? Some diplomatic veterans who have spoken with him have
told us that the president said that he did not realize, when he came to
office, how "hard" the Iran problem would be. But what is hard about the
Iran problem is not periodic inflammatory statements from President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad or episodes like Ms. Saberi's detention. What is really hard is
that getting America's Iran policy "right" would require a president to take
positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won't like. 

To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force
to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He
would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and
that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would
leave Iran in effect like Japan - a nation with an increasingly
sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to
manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept
that Iran's relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be
willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting
settlements of the Middle East's core political conflicts. 

It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of
failed policy toward the People's Republic of China and to reorient
America's posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America's
interests extremely well for more than 30 years. That took strategic vision,
political ruthlessness and personal determination. We hope that President
Obama - contrary to his record so far - will soon begin to demonstrate those
same qualities in forging a new approach toward Iran. 

Flynt Leverett directs the New America Foundation's geopolitics of energy
initiative and teaches at Penn State's School of International Affairs.
Hillary Mann Leverett is the president of a political risk consultancy. Both
are former National Security Council staff members.





________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: 
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40archives.econ.utah.edu