The Race for Iran

(Photo Credit: Defense Department Photostream)

CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus stated on Meet the Press yesterday that the United States is now pursuing the “pressure track” as a means to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

It appears that the administration is banking on one of two things happening. Either increased sanctions will make life so difficult for the Islamic Republic that it will capitulate and somehow give up or alter its nuclear program in a way that is beneficial to Western interests, or the Islamic Republic will collapse and a new government will emerge that is more eager to deal with the United States.

Last Sunday, Vice President Joe Biden and National Security Advisor General Jim Jones made comments directly linking sanctions to regime change in Tehran – suggesting that they think the second scenario above is a likely outcome. But what if the regime, which has persisted for 30 years despite immense international pressure and war, survives?

Even if more sanctions compelled Iran agreed to concessions on the nuclear issue, the United States has other very important interests with regard to Iran. The only way to prevent Iran from continuing to play “spoiler” in other areas such as peace with Israel and stabilizing Iraq is to fundamentally reorient and improve U.S.-Iranian relations.

The question we should be asking is, “What if the Islamic Republic manages to survive and does not agree to major concessions with regard to its nuclear program?” Then “the pressure track” will have only served to exacerbate the mutual hostility between Washington and Tehran and we will be even further from the kind of strategic opening that is so important for American interests.

– Ben Katcher

I have pasted a copy of yesterday’s IAEA Board of Governors Report on Iran below.

IAEA Report Iran 18Feb2010

– Ben Katcher

The International Crisis Group published an “Update Briefing” yesterday on “The Iran Nuclear Issue: The View From Beijing.”

The report is an excellent summary of the strategic, political, and economic sources of China’s policy toward the Iranian nuclear issue.

Its conclusions are largely consistent with, “Moving (Slightly) Closer to Iran
China’s Shifting Calculus for Managing Its “Persian Gulf Dilemma,” a mongoraph written by Race for Iran Publishers Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, along with Georgia Tech University Professor of International Relations John Garver.

It should also be noted that the report sources substantially both from the monograph and from this blog.

Some notable highlights from the report:

General Zhang Zhaozhong of China’s National Defense University told the ICG that “the enrichment technology of Iran is very primitive…Iran does not have very large quantities of uranium ore… And it’s a very long process from processing nuclear materials to actually developing nuclear weapons. Iran does not have the required facilities, equipments, or technology.”

The ICG reports that “[Chinese] analysts also had no qualms suggesting that China does not mind the [Iranian nuclear] issue tying up U.S. resources and attention.” This calls to mind The Washington Note Publisher Steve Clemons’ conversation with the Deputy Director of the Policy Planning staff of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who told Clemons that “We are trying to figure out how to keep you Americans distracted in small Middle Eastern countries.”

The report refers to Iran’s “binding” strategy, by which Iran is attempting to “bind” China to its economy and hydrocarbon resources by inducing Chinese investment. The latest evidence of this is Sinopec’s deal with NIOC to provide $6.5 billion for the joint development of two refineries.

The ICG concludes that while economic factors are key to China’s relations with Iran and opposition to sanctions, containing U.S. influence in the Middle East and maintaining a balance of power in the region are also central goals of Chinese strategy.

The full report is absolutely worth a read and can be found here.

One is left with the conclusion that supporting “crippling sanctions” does not fit into China’s management of its “Persian Gulf Dilemma.”

– Ben Katcher

Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times reporter and author of an endearing book about Turkey called Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds, is spot on in his analysis of the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran.

In laying out the American approach to Iran, Clinton showed how little US foreign policy has changed since the last years of the Bush administration. President Bush famously explained that he would not negotiate with unfriendly regimes because he didn’t want to “reward bad behaviour”. He wanted states like Iran to change of their own accord, not as a result of negotiation but as a pre-condition for being allowed to negotiate….

A more promising approach would be to tell Iran what President Nixon told China 35 years ago: if you agree to consider all of our complaints, we will consider all of yours. Clinton has made clear that the US will make no such offer. Instead it clings to the decades-old American policy toward Iran: make demands of the regime, threaten it, pressure it, sanction it, seek to isolate it, and hope for some vaguely defined positive result.

Some of America’s most seasoned diplomats are eager for the chance to see what kind of a “grand bargain” they could strike with Iran. An ideal one would curb the nuclear programme, guarantee some measure of protection for brave Iranians who are being brutalised for defending democratic ideals, and give Iran security guarantees that might lure it out of its isolation and lay the groundwork for a new security architecture in the Middle East. Instead the US has fallen back on sabre-rattling. This pleases Israel, war hawks in Washington, so-called American allies like Saudi Arabia – and most of all, President Ahmadinejad and his reactionary comrades in Tehran. They thrive on confrontation, and are doing all they can to bait the US into attacking their country. It is a strategy as effective as it is dangerous.

Kinzer’s short article can be read here.

– Ben Katcher

We have pasted below the text of an analysis of Hillary Clinton’s recent trip to the Middle East by Rami Khouri for Beirut’s The Daily Star.

The link to Khouri’s column is here.

Why Chuckles Greet the Hillary Show
by Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT — American secretaries of state have been coming to the Middle East to create all sorts of complex alliances against Iran for most of my happy adult life, and every time this show passes through our region I learn again the meaning of the phrase “lack of credibility.” Hillary Clinton is the latest to undertake this mission, and like her predecessors her comments often are difficult to take seriously.

We are told that her trip to the region has two main aims: strengthen Arab resolve to join the United States and others in imposing harsh new sanctions to stop Iran’s nuclear development program, and harness Arab support for resumed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. These important issues also represent two critical diplomatic arenas where the United States has both taken the lead and also achieved zero results. Either the actors involved — Arabs, Israelis, Iranians — are all chronically or even chromosomally dysfunctional (for which there is some evidence) or the United States is a particularly inept party to assume leadership in these endeavors.

The weakness in both cases, I suspect, has to do with the United States trying to define diplomatic outcomes that suit its own strategic objectives and political biases (especially pro-Israeli domestic sentiments in the US). So Washington pushes, pulls, cajoles and threatens all the players with various diplomatic instruments, except the one that will work most efficiently in both the Iranian and Arab-Israeli cases: serious negotiations with the principal parties, based on applying the letter of the law, and responding equally to the bottom-line rights, concerns and demands of all sides.

Two Clinton statements during her Gulf trip this week are particularly revealing of why the United States continues to fail in its missions in our region. The first was her expression of concern that Iran is turning into a military dictatorship: “We see that the Government of Iran, the supreme leader, the president, the parliament, is being supplanted, and that Iran is moving toward a military dictatorship.”

Half a century of American foreign policy flatly contradicts this sentiment (which is why Mrs. Clinton heard soft chuckles and a few muffled guffaws as she spoke). The United States has adored military dictatorships in the Arab world, especially states dominated by the shadowy world of intelligence services. This has become even more obvious since Sept. 11, 2001, when the US has intensified cooperation with intelligence services in the fight against Al-Qaeda and other terror groups.

Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East are military and police states where men with guns rule, and citizens are confined to shopping, buying cell phones, and watching soap operas on satellite television.

Countries like Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, the entire Gulf region, and others are devoted first and foremost to maintaining domestic order and regime incumbency through efficient multiple security agencies, for which they earn the friendship and cooperation of the United States. When citizens in these and other countries agitate for more democratic and human rights, the US is peculiarly inactive and quiet.

If Iran is indeed becoming a military dictatorship, this probably qualifies it for American hugs and aid, rather than sanctions and threats.

Mrs. Clinton badly needs some more credible talking points than opposing military dictatorships. (Extra credit question for hard-core foreign policy analysts: Why is it that when Turkey slipped out of military rule into civilian democratic governance it became more critical of the United States and Israel?)

The second intriguing statement during her Gulf visit was about Iran’s neighbors having three options for dealing with the “threat” from Iran:
“They can just give in to the threat; or they can seek their own capabilities, including nuclear; or they ally themselves with a country like the United States that is willing to help defend them…I think the third is by far the preferable option.”

This sounds reasonable, but it is not an accurate description of the actual options the Arab Gulf states have. It is mostly a description of how American and Israeli strategic concerns and slightly hysterical biases are projected onto the Arab Gulf states’ worldviews. These Arab states in fact have a fourth option, which is to negotiate seriously a modus vivendi with Iran that removes the “threat” from their perceptions of Iran by affirming the core rights and strategic needs of both sides, thus removing mutual threat perceptions.

This is exactly the same option the United States used when it negotiated détente and the Helsinki accords with the Soviet Union for decades (and whose results ultimately caused the collapse of Communism). Why the United States does not use the same sensible approach to the perceived threat from Iran is hard to explain, other perhaps than two reasons: The United States would have to deal with Iran (and other defiant Middle Easterners) through negotiations rather than haughty neo-colonialism, and, Israel would have to submit to nuclear inspections and stop its aggressive behavior.

– Ben Katcher