Unthinkable (18 page)

When it comes to Iran, the discomfiting truth is that we just don't have the kind of information that we would like to figure out how best to handle the Islamic Republic and its nuclear program. We don't know what Tehran's aim is for its nuclear program: whether it is meant to build nuclear weapons, achieve a breakout capability, or even remain peaceful—implausible though that may be. Nor can we be certain how the Iranian regime will behave after they acquire whatever status they seek. Perhaps
Professor Waltz was right, and Iran will become more restrained. Perhaps the Iran experts are wrong and the Iranians will prove to be insane millenarians who will launch nuclear weapons at Israel and Saudi Arabia the moment they have them. If either of these extreme visions were accurate, it would argue for extreme approaches to Iran—doing nothing in the case of the former and doing anything to prevent the latter. Moreover, there are vast uncertainties about how others will behave. Will the Saudis, Turks, and Egyptians seek to acquire nuclear arsenals of their own, or can they be dissuaded from doing so? How will Hizballah, Hamas, and other radical, Iranian-backed groups react? What will the Israelis do? And will the interaction of their various actions bolster the security of the region or suck it into even more violent disorder?
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Since we cannot know the answers to any of these huge questions, the best that we can do is make informed guesses about them. However, we need to recognize that the assumptions we make will inevitably dictate the policy (or policies) we prefer, because different policies only make sense based on specific assumptions. This is why the debate over Iran policy is often so vitriolic and unproductive: the various sides see the fundamental issues so differently that it is hard for them to find any common ground. It is challenging to discuss how best to make a policy work when people hold fundamentally opposite views about the basic assumptions underpinning the policy. At best, the debate becomes about the assumptions themselves—which is useful and honest, but ultimately inconclusive since none of us can actually prove which assumptions are correct.

Thus, the more you believe that Iran is likely to use its nuclear weapons unprovoked or to give them to terrorists, the more inclined you should be to use force against Iran. That should be obvious. If you believe that Iran is going to start nuking people, then going to war to prevent Tehran from getting the weapons in the first place is not just the best relative course of action, it is an absolute necessity to save the world from the horrors of nuclear conflict. On the other hand, if you agree with Waltz that a nuclear Iran will probably behave in a more restrained and prudent manner, then you probably see no need to try a revamped carrot-and-stick approach,
let alone explore the possibility of accelerating regime change to try to keep the Islamic Republic from acquiring a nuclear capability. In fact, if you think that a nuclear Iran will be more restrained than it currently is, why do anything at all? Pursuing any of the policy options to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability will be costly in myriad ways. If you think it unnecessary because you believe that Iran will be pacified by its acquisition of a nuclear arsenal, why pay the price—any price?

A similarly important and ambiguous set of assumptions concerns how any of these policies would work. The more you believe that inspections in Iran would follow the North Korea model—in which the inspectors were constrained, they saw little, and there was even less desire on the part of the great powers to punish Pyongyang for its transgressions—the less faith you are likely to have in any agreement with Iran. The extent to which you believe that a new inspections regime in Iran could more closely resemble the Iraqi model of intrusive, effective inspections coupled with a willingness on the part of the international community to act against misbehavior, the more likely that you will feel comfortable reaching the kind of deal with the Iranians that they just might be willing to accept.

The best that any of us can do is to simply be explicit about our assumptions and the evidence and methodologies we have used to arrive at them. I have given you my own answers to these questions in the preceding chapters, along with the evidence I have used to reach these conclusions. However, as you read the chapters that follow, you ought to be asking yourself how much you agree with me—and if you don't, in what ways your own views differ. The more that you disagree with my assumptions, the more you will likely disagree with my policy preferences because, in the case of Iran, it is your assumptions that determine your preferences.

There is one last issue that needs to be addressed before plunging into a discussion of each of the four proposed strategies for preventing Iran
from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability. That is why there is not a fifth option: pure engagement.
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In Ray Takeyh's words, a policy of pure engagement rests on the assumption that “Iran's nuclear ambition stems from a desire to craft a viable deterrence capability against a range of evolving threats, particularly from the United States. Instead of relying on threats of sanctions, a more effective way to convince Iran to suspend the critical components of its nuclear infrastructure is to find ways to diminish its strategic anxieties. Should Washington dispense with its hostilities, assure Iran that its interests will be taken into account as it plots the future of the Persian Gulf, and relax its economic prohibitions, then the case of nuclear proponents within the clerical state would be significantly weakened.”
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Between 2002 and 2009, a number of people, particularly on the left, advocated a policy of pure engagement with Iran—that is, the carrot without any threat of the stick. This group included many of the most accomplished and empathetic scholars of Iran.
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Their arguments were cogent, based on a reasonable interpretation of the evidence and, at that time, mostly untested. If I were writing this book prior to June 2009, I would have included pure engagement as a fifth option. But since then, too much has happened for engagement alone to remain a plausible approach.

The historical record always suggested that a policy of pure engagement was unlikely to succeed. In their compelling synthesis of the theoretical and historical records of engagement as a strategy, Richard Haass and Meghan O'Sullivan concluded that “[e]ngagement works best in pursuit of modest goals and often falters in pursuit of ambitious ones.”
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Changing Tehran's behavior on an issue of such importance as its nuclear program falls far into the ambitious category, suggesting that engagement alone was not practical. Similarly, Haass and O'Sullivan found that historically, “to be most effective, incentives offered in engagement strategies almost always need to be accompanied by credible penalties.”
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In their words, the “honey” of engagement had to be combined with the “vinegar” of penalties such as sanctions to have a realistic chance of
success.
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Indeed, the German scholar Johannes Reissner concluded that Europe's effort to pursue what in effect amounted to an engagement-only approach to Iran in the 1990s, called the “critical dialogue,” failed because it included no threat of retribution, no stick to accompany the carrot. As he wrote, the case of Europe's engagement with Iran in the 1990s “argues that sanctions should not be excluded from any engagement strategy, and, if endorsed, their role should be explicitly stated in policy pronouncements.”
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Indeed, these theoretical and historical objections to an engagement-only approach to Iran point to other problems. The fundamental assumption of this approach is that Iran's objectionable behavior is predicated on its perception of threat from the United States
and
that if the United States were to take actions that reduced Tehran's perception of threat, the Iranian leadership would diminish or cease that objectionable behavior. The first part of that sentence—that Iran's behavior is a defensive reaction to an American threat—is unknowable, and may vary from Iranian to Iranian. Some Iranian leaders, perhaps all, may be motivated by what they see as a defensive stance toward what they see as a pervasive American threat. We don't know, either for any given individual or for the leadership as a collective.

The second half of that sentence—that the United States can take actions that would reduce Iran's sense of that threat and that this diplomacy could in turn produce “better” Iranian behavior—is demonstrably false. Since the 1979 revolution, there have been a number of occasions when the United States and its allies either reached out to Iran to improve relations or made little or no effort to harm/threaten Iran, and Iran did
not
diminish its threatening behavior. In several of those cases, the Iranians acted in a
more
threatening and aggressive fashion toward the United States and its allies. A quick summary of these instances include:

• 1979: The Carter administration, having reconciled itself to the Iranian Revolution, attempted to develop a nonconfrontational relationship with the new regime. It had not imposed any sanctions on Iran and
had given up its flirtation with the idea of supporting a counterrevolution by the Iranian military (which the Iranians did not know about at the time). In response, Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy and Khomeini endorsed this diplomatic outrage, launching the “hostage crisis.”
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• 1982–89: Israel was trying hard to rebuild the close, if clandestine, relationship it had had with Iran under the Shah. It was covertly selling arms to Iran, which Iran desperately needed to fight Iraq at a time when no one else would sell it weapons. Nevertheless, when Israel invaded Lebanon—a move that did not threaten Iran in any way—Tehran responded by dispatching roughly one thousand Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley to arm, train, advise, and otherwise aid Lebanese forces fighting Israel. Iran would later go further to help organize and mount suicide bomber attacks against Israeli (and later American and French) diplomats and military forces in Lebanon.
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Again, none of these personnel, even the soldiers, posed any kind of threat to Iran itself.

• 2001–2012. From 2001 to 2005, the George W. Bush administration (Bush 43) largely tried to ignore Iran. Although his administration indulged in some unhelpful hostile rhetoric on a few occasions, it had also engaged in tacit cooperation with Iran over Afghanistan. Of greatest importance, the United States had made it clear to Iran that its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were not intended to threaten Iran, and the United States took no actions in either Iraq or Afghanistan that were harmful to Iran. Our toppling of the Taliban and Saddam, and our efforts to build democracies in both nations (which would ensure Shi'a predominance in Iraq), benefited Iran. Iran explicitly assisted U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and implicitly assisted them early on in Iraq. However, in both places Iran later began to support attacks on U.S. troops unprovoked. Especially in Iraq, Iran mounted a vast program of providing weapons, money, training, advice, and even operational planning to help indigenous groups kill American soldiers to try to drive the U.S. military out. This campaign preceded the new U.S. and UN sanctions
on Iran related to its nuclear program, which did not begin until 2006. Nor did this campaign abate during the Obama administration's yearlong effort to engage Iran in 2009, during which time no new sanctions were imposed on Iran.

Clearly it is not American behavior that generates Iran's objectionable actions. It is either the Iranian leadership's pathological perceptions of the United States or its own aggressive ambitions, neither of which appears to be affected by less threatening American behavior. There is no reason to believe that unilaterally moderating American actions toward Iran will produce a similar change from Tehran.

Contrary to the central logic of the engagement-only approach, the only times that Iran has signaled a willingness to repair relations with the United States have come when it felt most threatened by American actions.

• In 1995, when the United States was imposing, for the first time, comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran—and would go on to impose the first secondary sanctions on foreign firms doing significant business with the Iranian oil industry—President Rafsanjani signed a deal with the U.S. firm Conoco to develop a pair of Iranian offshore oilfields.
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This bid was important for Rafsanjani (albeit, not necessarily for the rest of the Iranian regime) to improve relations. It came at a moment when the United States was ratcheting up pressure on Iran.
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• In 1997–2000, Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, made a sustained effort to begin a real rapprochement with the United States. Ultimately, Khatami failed because Iran's conservative establishment (led by Ayatollah Khamene'i himself) opposed him. Although Khatami's election reflected popular Iranian unhappiness with many aspects of the clerical regime's rule, one aspect of that unhappiness was displeasure with the deepening antagonism between Iran and the United States, which had resulted in comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran by the Clinton administration in 1995–97. This economic
displeasure was one reason that Khatami made such a determined effort to repair relations with the United States.
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• Briefly in 2003, the Iranians made a conciliatory gesture to the United States. In May a message was delivered via the Swiss Embassy purporting to be a “road map” of how Iran and the United States might reconcile. Although the provenance and importance of this gesture remain contested, it appears to have been—at the very least—an Iranian gambit to convince the United States not to invade Iran after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There is no question that the Iranian leadership feared that the United States would attack Iran next, and this anxiety prompted Tehran to agree to the most far-reaching concessions on its nuclear program that it ever made: suspending enrichment and signing the Additional Protocol of the NPT.
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The May 2003 message to the United States was part of that effort, but it may also have been a bid by more moderate elements of the Iranian regime to try to start a wider rapprochement between the two countries (although this is far from proven).
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In the words of the principal Iranian author of this missive, Ambassador to France Sadegh Kharrazi, “In 2003 there was a wall of mistrust between Iran and the U.S. and they could attack us at any moment. Therefore, the government accepted my suggestion and sent a conciliatory letter to the U.S. administration.”
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Likewise, Hamid Reza Taraghi, another important Iranian hardliner, has explained that “[a]fter 9/11 and its consequences, we were very worried and a group of the [Iranian Parliamentary] Deputies met with the Supreme leader and explained the root of their fear. We reached the conclusion that Iran was facing a real threat and we could be occupied as it happened in 1941. . . . We asked the Leader to be more moderate toward the U.S. He accepted our view and through the government and other officials, wisely and successfully managed that dangerous time.”
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