Unthinkable (23 page)

That may just be the rub. Iran has not implemented the terms of the Additional Protocol even though it has signed it. Therefore, any new deal with Iran must be tied to Tehran's implementation of the Additional Protocol. If it fails to do so, it must face the immediate reimposition of the sanctions. However, the experiences of Iraq and other countries demonstrate that it is difficult to get the UN Security Council to agree to impose harsh sanctions in response to violations. It typically takes a long time, enormous diplomatic lifting, and blatant recalcitrance on the part of the violator. Building on the lessons from Iraq, any deal with Iran should instead leave the existing sanctions in place permanently, but have them suspended temporarily, and subject to renewable suspensions that the Security Council would have to regularly vote to enact. In this way, anytime that the inspectors determined that Iran was violating the terms of the agreement, it would require nothing more than an American (or French or British) veto to bring the sanctions back into effect.

Many Americans and Israelis insist that any nuclear agreement must require Iran to close the Fordow centrifuge enrichment plant, which the Iranians built deep inside a mountain to render it impervious to attack
by Israel and possibly the United States as well.
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We can certainly ask for its closure, but we should not be hopeful. The only reason that we want Fordow closed is that without it, Iran's nuclear program is much more vulnerable to attack by the air forces of the United States, Israel, and others. That is not the kind of rationale that is likely to appeal to most of the peace-loving nations of the world. For their part, the Iranians have invested an enormous amount in Fordow to diminish their vulnerability and are unlikely to give that up. Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the head of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, made the point that “Fordow will never be shut down because . . . our national duty is to be able to defend our nuclear and vital centers against an enemy threat. . . . This suggestion is meant to help the Zionist regime.”
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What's more, unlike with enrichment itself, the West has no legal basis to demand that Fordow be shut down now that it has been declared to the IAEA for regular inspections.

ECONOMIC INDUCEMENTS.
Given the depleted state of Iran's economy, economic inducements are likely to be the most straightforward element of a new international overture to Iran. Under the Bush administration, Tehran was offered membership in the World Trade Organization, the lifting of international sanctions, and the resumption of its pre-sanctions trade agreements with Europe and Japan. These inducements were not enough to convince Iran to take the deal. The Obama administration offered only vaguer promises of the same—along with a willingness to sell Iran spare parts for its aged fleet of Boeing airliners. The latter was a laughable incentive.

A last bid to make the carrot-and-stick approach work with Iran will have to include the promise of greater economic rewards. These should include:

• The prospect of loans and other support from international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

• The lifting of not only international sanctions but unilateral sanctions against Iran as well, particularly the comprehensive unilateral sanctions imposed by the United States.

• A universal settlement of all claims between Iran and the United States (which include monies owed for some Iranian arms purchases, the freezing of assets, and other matters that the Iranians believe constitute a sizable amount of money).

• The provision of positive inducements for expanded international trade and investment in Iran, including trade credits and investment guarantees for foreign firms putting capital into Iran.

• Development assistance for Iranian agriculture, infrastructure, education, energy, and environmental modernization.

In addition, offering to lift the unilateral American sanctions against Iran—which the Bush administration was never willing to offer explicitly because of its attachment to regime change—could have a major impact on Iranian thinking because the average Iranian and the regime's chief economic officials desire it.

SECURITY GUARANTEES.
Whatever other purposes it may serve, Tehran's pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability is almost certainly meant to deter attacks against Iran. Consequently, another set of positive incentives that the international community will likely have to offer are guarantees for the security of the country and its regime—two quite different things.

Many Americans have suggested that the United States pledge not to attack Iran or try to overthrow its government, as President John F. Kennedy did for Cuba as part of the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such a pledge may or may not be necessary, but Washington should not assume that it will be sufficient. Tehran will likely want more concrete actions by the United States (and other countries) if it is to give up the safety of a potential nuclear arsenal—even a theoretical one. It is critical that the international community, and especially the United States, provide such tangible demonstrations of good faith both because it is
unlikely that the Iranian people will be swayed otherwise, and because it can assuage the residual fears of European and Asian publics that the United States is using the diplomatic process to set up a military operation against Iran.

The more difficult challenge will be to diminish the conventional military threat posed to Iran by American forces in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean without sacrificing America's commitments in the region. The United States has vital interests in the Persian Gulf, and Washington intends to maintain significant conventional military forces in the region for the foreseeable future. Given the power of the American military, those forces will always constitute a threat to Iran.

The United States could make unilateral concessions to Tehran related to military deployments, such as agreeing to station no more than one aircraft carrier battle group in the Gulf or Arabian Sea at any time. However, Tehran is unlikely to view this arrangement as much of a concession because of how easy it would be for the United States to break that agreement if it ever chose to do so. The problem is further compounded by Washington's understandable unwillingness not to go much beyond that (assuming it is willing to go even that far) for fear of jeopardizing its ability to respond to problems in the fragile Gulf region. A new security architecture in the Persian Gulf is probably the only realistic way to meet Iran's legitimate security concerns in a manner that would be palatable to the United States and its allies in the region. A Gulf security process could follow the successful Cold War European model by starting with security discussions, building to confidence-building measures, and eventually reaching arms control agreements. Thus the United States ought to be willing to offer the inauguration of just such a process, using the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) as a starting point. Such a process would hold out the potential for Iran to secure constraints on the deployment and operation of American military forces in the region in return for their agreement to take on equivalent limitations on their own forces.
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Interestingly, a senior Iranian diplomat has already suggested the same in a Western newspaper.
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POLITICAL ACCEPTANCE.
Any agreement encompassing—but hopefully not limited to—Iran's nuclear program would also have to address Iran's regional aspirations as well. A key question will be whether Iranians are ready to be accepted as a legitimate participant in the international politics of the Middle East, but not the dominant state in the region, as many Iranians seem to want. Views on this matter vary in Tehran, but it is unclear what the Iranian leadership would accept. Direct negotiations with Iran should help ascertain whether compromise is possible. Under no circumstances, however, should the United States grant Iran a position of dominance, nor should we leave any ambiguity about what we see as Iran's appropriate role in the region. Our allies in the GCC fear that Washington hopes to resurrect the alliance with a domineering Iran that the Johnson and Nixon administrations tried to use to keep the peace of the Gulf. Helping Iran address legitimate security concerns and allowing it a political role in the region does not mean granting Tehran regional hegemony.

If Iran can be persuaded to make significant compromises on its nuclear program—and its support for terrorism and other anti–status quo activities—by positive inducements alone, that would be fantastic. But the history of the Islamic Republic should make us skeptical. At the very least, we need to be prepared for them to resist the urge, for some time if not permanently. If that is the case, it will be wise to have a well-developed set of new disincentives with which to try to convince the Iranians to change their minds.

The question is really what we still have left to try in the category of sticks. Specifically, what haven't we tried already? And if we haven't tried it already, is it because there were good reasons not to?

COVERT ACTION.
I left the CIA almost two decades ago, and I have no idea what those guys are up to now. But I have noticed that the
New York Times
is overflowing with articles sourced to senior Obama administration officials claiming that the United States has an active covert action program against Iran.
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In a stunningly unusual event, the head of Britain's external intelligence agency, MI6, Sir John Sawers, took credit for MI6's involvement in a covert action campaign to derail Iran's nuclear weapons work.
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The
Times
and other media outlets seem convinced that the U.S. government has mounted an aggressive cyberwarfare campaign against Iran that has disrupted Iran's nuclear program by attacking the program's computer networks.
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The most famous piece of malware that the United States reportedly developed—along with the Israelis—was the Stuxnet virus that played havoc with the operation of Iran's nuclear centrifuges, delaying the Iranian program by as much as two years.
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The Iranians believe that the second most famous malware to attack their computer networks, the Flame virus, was built in Israel, and one senior Israeli official implicitly confirmed this notion.
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Since then, Tehran has claimed to have suffered from or defeated other cyberattacks on its nuclear, security, and oil infrastructures.
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These attacks have been so threatening that Tehran has taken the extreme step of disconnecting several of its main Persian Gulf oil terminals from the Internet to protect them from cyberattack.
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Someone is also killing Iranian nuclear scientists, cutting power lines to their nuclear facilities, blowing up their missile bases, and conducting other forms of sabotage.
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I have no proof, but I have a lot of Israeli friends who seem to be enthusiastic about these attacks. Israeli (and American) journalists seem to be just as certain that Mossad is behind the assassinations and sabotage campaign as their American counterparts are certain that CIA and the National Security Agency are involved in the cyberwar campaign.
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At least one former senior Israeli official has implied that Israel is part of this effort, and the Iranians have not exactly been quiet in claiming that this campaign is the work of the Israelis with assistance from the United States and Great Britain. For instance, in July 2012, former Israeli national security advisor Uzi Arad responded to a question from the IDF Radio network regarding an attack on Israeli officials
in Bulgaria that Israel believed was conducted by Iranian assets, saying, “We are, to a large extent, the initiators. . . . Mainly, we're leading a struggle against Iran. We're not a passive side. And the other side is the defending, deterring, and attacking one.”
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At times, the Iranians have claimed that they had proof of American involvement.
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The Iranians have also asserted that the Israelis, Americans, and British have been arming and encouraging Kurdish, Baluch, and Arab separatists.
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The author Mark Perry has interviewed sources who claim to have seen classified U.S. memos that absolved the CIA of any involvement with the Baluch but indicated that Mossad was supporting them.
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Even if all of this chatter is only partially true, it strongly suggests that the Western allies have an aggressive covert action campaign going on against Iran. Which raises the question of how much have Western covert actions been responsible for Iran's new willingness to talk about its nuclear program, and how much could they help convince Iran to make real concessions in the future?

We cannot know for certain. The Iranians complain enough about these attacks that we can say that they do not like them. But no Iranian has directly tied covert action attacks—cyber, assassination, sabotage, support to disaffected Iranian ethnic groups—to the need to negotiate with the West. So far, that argument has been reserved for sanctions. This distinction is noteworthy because the covert attacks
are
part of the Iranian conversation. The hardliners lump together the covert action campaign, the sanctions, and Western support for the Green Movement and other democratic oppositionists as elements of the “soft war” they claim the West is waging against Iran to try to topple the Iranian government. They justify making no concessions based on the need to fight back. The moderates and pragmatists ignore this argument and focus on the hardships created by the sanctions to argue that Iran must make some compromises on the nuclear issue.

Several U.S. military officers familiar with the U.S. cyber effort against Iran have all used the same phrase with me: “We are already at war with Iran” in the cyber arena. They have described fending off constant attacks
by Iran and implied that the United States has hurt Iran more than they have hurt us.
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If that is the case, it is just not clear how much more we could ratchet up the pressure on Iran in the cyber world. To the extent that we can do even more damage to Iran in the future through ramped up cyber and covert action attacks, we should be careful. People die from these attacks. Beyond the moral dimensions, we need to recognize that killing people can cause an adversary to overreact, especially when it is an adversary as paranoid and xenophobic as Iran's Islamic regime.
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