Hating The Bomb
The New York Times
Sun 22 Jan 2006
DAVID BROOKS

The Iraq debate split the country into two partisan camps, but the
Iran debate is much more complicated. It's opening up a rift between
conservatives and the Bush administration. It's dividing Democrats into rival
factions: those who can contemplate the eventual use of force against Iran
and those who can't.

It's an anguished debate because all the options are terrible. But this
will be the major foreign policy controversy of the 2008 presidential
election, and you can already see four different schools emerging:

THE PRE-EMPTIONISTS -- John McCain and most American conservatives believe
the situation reeks of Nazi Germany in 1933. An anti-Semitic demagogue is
breaking treaties and threatening to wipe Israel off the map. The madman
means what he says and can't be restrained by normal economic or diplomatic
incentives.

Therefore, Iran cannot be allowed to get the bomb. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may
not immediately lob the big one onto Tel Aviv, but a psychotic, hegemonic
Iran would unleash its terrorist vassals and strangle democratic efforts in
the Middle East, and could set off a cataclysmic war.

Pre-emptors would work with Europe and the U.N. to step up pressure on
Iran, while making it clear the world is willing to do what it takes to halt
the nuclear program. As McCain said on "Face the Nation": "There is only
one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option. That is
a nuclear-armed Iran."

THE SANCTIONISTS -- Democratic presidential contenders like Hillary Clinton
and Evan Bayh have begun hitting the Bush administration from the right. But
as Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution notes, this is not just campaign
posturing. Centrist Democrats also believe Iranian nukes are unacceptable.
Such nukes would set off a regional arms race. They would lead to Cuban
missile crisis standoffs in the world's most unstable region. If Iran
completes its program, that would completely delegitimize the international
system.

The Sanctionists don't rule out a pre-emptive strike, but they don't
emphasize it. Instead, they say the U.S. should be directly involved in
negotiating with Iran, and the world should quickly impose serious economic
sanctions, what Chuck Schumer calls an "economic stranglehold."

THE REFORMISTS -- Oddly, the Bush administration finds itself on the
cautious, noninterventionist side. Bush officials have been walking away from
broad economic sanctions and pre-emptive strikes (while not formally ruling
them out). Blustery threats may sound good, they say, but when you are
governing, you have to consider the consequences; you have to hold the global
coalition together; you have to make sure Iran isn't provoked into really
dismantling Iraq.

In all my conversations with senior administration officials, I have never
heard them be so cautious about what they can know and tentative about what
they can achieve.

Their chief leverage, they say, is that Iran is not North Korea. The
Iranians do not want to be global pariahs. There is an Iranian elite that
likes travel and conducts international business, and it is beginning to
react against Ahmadinejad's radical talk.

The administration believes blunt sanctions will drive the populace into
the arms of the regime, but surgical sanctions will motivate internal
reformers to change the regime's course. Privately, some administration
officials believe there is no way to prevent Iran from getting the bomb; we
might as well try to make the regime as palatable as possible.

THE SILENT FATALISTS -- Mainstream Democrats have been remarkably quiet on
this issue. Their main conviction is that American-led military action would
be disastrous. This shapes their definition of the problem. A nuclear Iran
may not be so cataclysmic, they privately say. Why shouldn't Iran have as
much right to the bomb as any other nation? The regime may be nasty, but it's
containable with deterrence and engagement.

These liberals argue that if we weren't in Iraq, we'd have a lot more
freedom to act against Iran, though you could also say the crisis would be
worse if Saddam were still in power.

These four approaches have one thing in common: they all stink. For
example, despite administration hopes, there is scant reason to believe that
imagined Iranian cosmopolitans would shut down the nuclear program, or could
if they wanted to, or could do it in time -- before Israel forced the issue
to a crisis point.

This is going to be a lengthy and tortured debate, dividing both parties.
We'll probably be engaged in it up to the moment the Iranian bombs are built
and fully functioning.

Op-Ed Contributor
The Gulf Between Us

By FLYNT LEVERETT
Published: January 24, 2006
Washington


Douglas Fraser


AS the United States and its European partners consider their next steps to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, let's recall how poorly the Bush administration has handled this issue. During its five years in office, the administration has turned away from every opportunity to put relations with Iran on a more positive trajectory. Three examples stand out.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Tehran offered to help Washington overthrow the Taliban and establish a new political order in Afghanistan. But in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that Iran was part of an "axis of evil," thereby scuttling any possibility of leveraging tactical cooperation over Afghanistan into a strategic opening.

In the spring of 2003, shortly before I left government, the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve bilateral differences. The document acknowledged that Iran would have to address concerns about its weapons programs and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. It was presented as having support from all major players in Iran's power structure, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A conversation I had shortly after leaving the government with a senior conservative Iranian official strongly suggested that this was the case. Unfortunately, the administration's response was to complain that the Swiss diplomats who passed the document from Tehran to Washington were out of line.

Finally, in October 2003, the Europeans got Iran to agree to suspend enrichment in order to pursue talks that might lead to an economic, nuclear and strategic deal. But the Bush administration refused to join the European initiative, ensuring that the talks failed.

Now Washington and its allies are faced with two unattractive options for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue. They can refer the issue to the Security Council, but, at a time of tight energy markets, no one is interested in restricting Iranian oil sales. Other measures under discussion - travel restrictions on Iranian officials, for example - are likely to be imposed only ad hoc, with Russia and China as probable holdouts. They are in any case unlikely to sway Iranian decision-making, because unlike his predecessor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disdains being feted in European capitals.

Alternatively, the United States (or Israel) could strike militarily at Iran's nuclear installations. But these are spread across Iran, and planners may not know all of the targets that would need to be hit. Moreover, a strike could prove counterproductive by hardening Iranian resolve to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity.

Is there a way out of this strategic dead end? Nuclear diplomacy with Iran, never an easy proposition, has been made harder not only by poor policy choices in Washington, but also by trends in Iranian politics. Mr. Ahmadinejad's electoral victory last year against former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani suggests that a significant number of Iranians linked Mr. Rafsanjani's call for rapprochement with the West with his corrupt past and rejected both in favor of Mr. Ahmadinejad's populist nationalism. Moreover, Mr. Ahmadinejad's execrable rhetoric about Israel and the Holocaust threatens to make future Western engagement look like appeasement.

These developments have severely circumscribed the possibilities for diplomacy between the United States and Iran. Iranian officials with ties to the Ayatollah Khamenei continue to stress in private conversations that key players on Iran's National Security Council - the chief decision-making body for foreign policy - remain interested in a strategic dialogue with Washington. But the popularly elected President Ahmadinejad could easily marshal resistance to any "grand bargain" with the United States. And absent a more positive strategic context, efforts to reopen discussions on a discrete issue of mutual interest, like Iraq, would at best only reprise the experience of short-lived tactical cooperation over Afghanistan.

Last week, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, suggested a way out of this impasse - one that might also help address other pressing challenges in the Persian Gulf. The Saudi prince noted that if Iranian nuclear weapons were deployed against Israel, they would kill Palestinians, and if they missed Israel, they would hit Arab countries. And so he urged Iran "to accept the position that we have taken to make the Gulf, as part of the Middle East, nuclear free and free of weapons of mass destruction."

While Prince Saud blamed Israel for starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, his implication that a nuclear-weapons-free Gulf might precede a regionwide nuclear-weapons-free zone is a nuanced departure from longstanding Arab insistence that regional arms control cannot begin without Israel's denuclearization. The United States and its partners should build on this idea and support the creation of a Gulf Security Council that would include Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states in the Gulf, as well as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

The Gulf Security Council would not replace American alliances with traditional security partners, but it would operate alongside them, much as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has operated alongside NATO. The council would provide a framework under which the United States could guarantee that it would not use force to change Iran's borders or form of government, provided that Iran committed itself to regionally defined and monitored norms for nonproliferation (including a nuclear weapons ban), counterterrorism and human rights. States concerned about Iran's nuclear activities would then have new leverage to ensure Iranian compliance with these commitments. Additionally, pressing Iran to abide by standards defined and administered multilaterally might be more acceptable to China and Russia than pushing Iran to accept an American reinterpretation of its nonproliferation obligations.

Such a framework would leapfrog over proposals for establishing a "contact group" of Iraq's neighbors and offer all parts of the Iranian political spectrum - even the hard-liners around Mr. Ahmadinejad - something they want: recognition of Iran's leading regional role. Besides rejuvenating efforts to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, it could provide essential support for stabilization in Iraq, as the inclusion of Iran and Saudi Arabia would bring together the two states that could be most useful in brokering compromises between Shiite and Sunni communities there.

A diplomatic resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem is still within reach. But successful diplomacy will require a bold new vision. The next time the five permanent members of the Security Council convene to discuss Iran, perhaps they should meet in Riyadh rather than London.


Flynt Leverett, a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. He is writing a book about the future of Saudi Arabia.