The Race for Iran

Today, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius devoted his column, see here, to growing concerns within the Obama Administration that “Israel will attack Iran militarily over the next few months.”  Ignatius describes U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as believing “there is a strong likelihood that Israel will strike Iran in April, May or June—before Iran enters what Israelis described as a ‘zone of immunity’ to commence building a nuclear bomb.”  Ignatius goes on to note,

“Very soon, the Israelis fear, the Iranians will have enough enriched uranium in deep underground facilities to make a weapon—and only the U.S. could then stop them militarily.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t want to leave the fate of Israel dependent on American action, which would be triggered by intelligence that Iran is building a bomb, which it hasn’t done yet.” 

Ignatius’ column comes, of course, on the heels of the publication of Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman’s article in the current New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Will Israel Attack Iran?”, see here, in which Bergman concludes, “After speaking with many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”  In our own conversations, around Washington and elsewhere, we are hearing many of the same expressions of concern echoed by Ignatius—the American military, in particular, is increasingly inclined to believe that Israel will strike, perhaps even earlier than the time frame suggested by Panetta. 

We will consider below various strategic and political factors affecting an Israeli decision to attack Iran.  The immediate, tactical variable driving Israel’s apparent push toward war is the ongoing installation of centrifuges in the new enrichment facility at Fordo, near Qom.  The Fordo facility is, according to reports, located inside a small mountain, making it very difficult to destroy from the air, at least not without using nuclear weapons.  The installation and operation of centrifuges at Fordo is proceeding under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitoring, but, from an Israeli perspective, that does not matter—for it is Fordo that is creating the “zone of immunity” (the phrase, it seems, was coined by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak) over which the Israelis are so agitated. 

All of the relevant unclassified assessments and, it would seem, the U.S. military believe that Israel would strike Iranian nuclear facilities primarily from the air.  The operation would be at the outermost levels of Israel’s military capability.  The number of Israeli strike aircraft that can operate at the necessary ranges (assuming no problems with aerial refueling) is such that Israeli forces could not strike very many targets inside Iran.  For Natanz (Iran’s first and most developed enrichment site) as well as Fordo, Israeli pilots would have to hit their aim points not just with precise aim but also with precise timing, tightly sequencing their bombs so that the blasts penetrate deeply enough to damage their intended targets.  To be sure, multiple sources have told us over the past several years that the Israeli air force has been practicing this sort of mission intensively.  Nevertheless, with Fordo now in the picture, reports, e.g., see here, that Israel has set up a new commando unit charged with carrying out missions “deep inside enemy territory” suggest that the Israeli attack plan might include the deployment of commando forces on the ground, with the assignment to fight their way into the new facility and ensure that it was truly destroyed. 

All of these considerations have made us skeptical that the Israelis would take a decision to strike Iranian nuclear targets on their own—and to do so in the face of nearly universal assessments that even a maximally successful attack would not inflict that much damage on Iran’s nuclear program.  Periodically intense speculation about an Israeli military campaign against the Iranian program has seemed to us as highly useful for leveraging the United States and its international partners to impose ever tighter sanctions against the Islamic Republic, launch ever more covert operations against Iran, and so on.  But actually to decide to strike, with all of the attendant and enormous risks—for Israel, for oil prices and the world economy, and for America’s position in the Middle East—has seemed to us a low-probability outcome. 

We remain skeptical that the Israelis will take such a decision.  No less than Jeffrey Goldberg noted, in commenting on Bergman’s article, that the same sources which persuaded Bergman that Israel will attack in 2012 had persuaded Goldberg, in 2010, that Israel would strike Iran by July 2011. 

However, we must note that Israeli “spin” (if spin is all it remains) about the risk of an attack has reached levels and taken forms that we have not seen in several years.  So, we thought it timely to re-evaluate the factors that might plausibly lead Prime Minister Netanyahu and other senior Israeli leaders to opt for preventive war.  Beyond development of the Fordo facility, three factors strike us as especially relevant in this regard. 

–The first is the prospect of President Obama’s re-election.  Israelis with access to the Prime Minister’s office tell us that Netanyahu and his inner circle have long believed that Obama is politically vulnerable.  From this perspective, ordering an Israeli strike before the U.S. presidential election in November could seem the “smart” play:  it would be very hard for Obama to try to distance himself from the Israeli action (something that, according to Ignatius, the Obama Administration seems to believe it can do) without seriously jeopardizing his re-election; at the same time, if Obama were to win re-election, it is better, from an Israeli perspective, to have this potentially unpleasant business of an illegal war against Iran out of the way before he is sworn in for a second term.  (Recall that, the last time that the Israeli military invaded Gaza, it did so at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, to ensure that the campaign would be over before Obama was first sworn in.) 

–The second factor is Israeli perceptions of the strategic fallout from the Arab spring.  Mubarak’s fall, especially, has spooked Israeli political and military leaders.  One might think that, at such a time of tumultuous change and uncertainty in the region, Israel would be best served by hunkering down and staying out of (more) trouble (than it is already in).  But, based on a lot of experience dealing with Israeli national security professionals while we served in the U.S. government, we can envision a scenario in which Israeli decision-makers persuade themselves that this is precisely the time to re-establish the credibility of what Israeli elites like to call their “deterrent edge”—a misuse of the term deterrence, for it really refers to Israel’s ability to use force first, whenever, wherever, and for whatever purpose it wants. 

–Third, with the withdrawal of American military personnel and assets from Iraq, Iraq is left with, effectively, no air defense capability—which means that Israeli planes would have a more-or-less clean shot into Iran through Iraqi airspace. 

We are going to watch this one very, very closely. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

In an update to our last post, see here, we asked Scott Lucas to stop posting “comments” that are devoid of commentary but merely repeat his streaming of select “news” items from Iran.  We noted that what he has been doing recently is disrupting the ability of others to engage in genuine exchange, debate, and discussion, which is the purpose of this website. 

Lucas has made it clear that he does not intend to stop his abusive practice, even though what he is doing is a kind of theft.  Because of difficulties he has with his own platform, he is trying to steal Race for Iran and turn it into a propaganda outlet for his self-appointed mission.  We have no idea about the provenance or reliability of his “news” items, and do not want Race for Iran turned into a propaganda outlet for anyone, whether the MEK, disaffected Iranian expatriates, national governments, or Scott Lucas.  We are reviewing our options now for protecting Race for Iran from such misappropriation.  We thank everyone for their continuing support. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

**UPDATED, see below**

We have long supported a comprehensive approach to U.S.-Iranian realignment as the only way to put U.S.-Iranian relations on a more productive trajectory.  But we do not understand how anyone can think that the Islamic Republic of Iran—any more than the People’s Republic of China—would negotiate its internal political transformation with the United States. 

Yet this is precisely what Trita Parsi argues in his new book, A Single Roll of the Dice:  Obama’s Diplomacy With Iran, blending distorted treatments of both Iranian politics and Obama’s Iran policy into a deeply misleading and agenda-driven account.  In the aftermath of the Islamic Republic’s 2009 presidential election (which Parsi assured us, and continues to assure his readers, was “fraudulent”), Parsi was one of the most publicly prominent voices calling on the Obama Administration to take a “tactical pause” from diplomacy (which had not yet commenced).  He advocated for such a pause because, he told large numbers of television viewers and Op Ed readers, the Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse. 

Well, here we are, almost three years later.  The Islamic Republic is still here.  Parsi, for his part, has returned to advocating U.S. engagement with Iran—but only if the Islamic Republic’s internal politics and “human rights situation” are a central part of the agenda.  And the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the advocacy group headed by Parsi, tells us on its website that the goal of U.S. engagement should be “a world in which the United States and a democratic Iran”—no mention of the Islamic Republic—“enjoy peaceful, cooperative relations.” 

Make no mistake:  this is neoconservatism without guns, effectively indistinguishable from the position of Michael Ledeen, who parts from other neoconservatives to side with Parsi and NIAC in opposing military action against Iran, but is ideologically committed to regime change there. 

In a war-fevered environment, a book like Parsi’s can make a difference.  Recall, in this regard, the impact just a decade ago of Ken Pollack’s The Threatening Storm:  The Case for Invading Iraq, which helped to legitimate Democratic support for George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq—and which was dead wrong, analytically and empirically, in all of its major arguments.  To be sure, Parsi’s book is not written as a case for war against Iran, something that Parsi says he does not want.  But, like Pollack, Parsi advances baseless evidence and agenda-driven analysis.  And, in the same way that Pollack’s work helped pave the way for invading Iraq, Parsi’s book—by reinforcing conventional wisdom about Iranian politics and Obama’s Iran policy and counseling bad policy, raises the risk of another disastrous war in the Middle East. 

Because Pollack, like Parsi, is not considered a neoconservative hawk, his book did not get the critical scrutiny it should have before the U.S. went to war.  Although we like Trita Parsi personally, we are compelled to say what we think is so fundamentally wrong and dangerous about his book.  Therefore, we have just published an extended review of A Single Roll of the Dice in Boston Review.  Our essay, entitled “The Soft Side of Regime Change:  Trita Parsi’s A Single Roll of the Dice”, is available online, by clicking here.  We would encourage those interested in posting comments to also do so directly on the Boston Review site; there is a place to do so at the bottom of our article. 

****************UPDATE*********************

UPDATE:  We have put up with an increasing amount of abuse of this site by Scott Lucas, which a number of people have already complained about in their comments to recent posts.  First of all, we ask Scott Lucas to stop posting “comments” that are devoid of commentary but merely repeat his streaming of select “news” items from Iran.  It is disrupting the ability of others to engage in genuine exchange, debate, and discussion.  If Lucas would like to comment on our site, he knows that he has always been welcome.  Curiously, Lucas has chosen, instead, to comment on our Boston Review article on Trita Parsi’s book, not on Race For Iran, but elsewhere.  We will respond here to his criticisms of our article, which he has posted on the Boston Review site and in other venues. 

Lucas says we have “no support for [our] polemical claims here…apart from the now thread-bare reliance on aging polls conducted with suspect methodology and in the political and ‘security’ environment after the election.”  Three points on this. 

–First, that the 14 polls we cite are “aging” is irrelevant to what they have to say about the dynamics of Iranian public opinion surrounding an election that itself took place almost three years ago. 

–Second, if Lucas wants to claim that these polls’ methodology was “suspect”, he should be obliged to explain what he means by that.  When we describe the polls as “methodologically sound”, we mean the following:  they had sufficiently large and scientifically selected samples to represent accurately the population as a whole and used neutral, clearly worded questions.  Is there anything concrete about these polls that Lucas can identify which would contradict our characterization of them in these terms?  We doubt it.  As to the polls being done in a repressive environment, if Lucas would read the polls in detail he would understand that the pollsters went to considerable lengths to verify that respondents were expressing their true views.  Respondents were hardly averse to voicing criticisms of various aspects of Iranian political life.  The polls done after the election showed no bandwagoning effect, with people trying to present themselves as having been with the re-elected President all along.  And there is a remarkable degree of consistency across the polls, which is a powerful indicator that people were not lying to the pollsters.  If Lucas has something to say on these points that actually deals with polling methodology, he should say it.  Otherwise, he is the one being polemical, not us. 

–Third, it is simply not accurate that, since June 2009, we have “largely relied on a single source, who is supportive of the regime,” for our information, which has made us “near blind” to current conditions in Iran.  This is a cheaply ad hominem statement about us; it also slanders one of our colleagues at the University of Tehran.  We have spent the last 12 years listening to and taking seriously the views of a wide range of Iranian officials, who worked for the Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Ahmadinejad administrations, as well as the views of Iranians in a range of professions who, while they may not support every decision or policy of the Iranian government, nonetheless believe in the Islamic Republic.  This is what differentiates our work from that of any other Western analyst we know.  It is also what has enabled us to be consistently right in our assessments of Iranian foreign policy and domestic politics, including in episodes such as the 2009 election and its aftermath, when most other analysts were categorically wrong—from their baseless assertions of massive fraud to their obviously incorrect predictions of the Islamic Republic’s implosion. 

Finally, we want to underscore that challenging the “social fact” of the fraudulent 2009 election, created so cavalierly by Parsi, Lucas, and others, is at least as vital, if not more so, than challenging the “social fact” of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.  Confronting unsubstantiated claims about a “fraudulent” election gets to the foundations of the case for regime change—which, whether represented by hard militarists like John Bolton or soft regime change advocates like Trita Parsi and Scott Lucas, is ultimately what gets the United States into Middle Eastern wars.  This is the same dangerous convergence of the neoconservative right with liberal human rights advocates that enabled the Iraq war.  If the argument had only been over Saddam’s WMD, it is not at all clear the United States would have gone to war.  The United States does not really care all that categorically about nuclear proliferation; it has certainly been prepared to tolerate that where Israel is concerned.  What matters is the kind of regime the United States believes it is dealing with.  That is why pushing back about the social fact of a fraudulent election—brought up again now by Trita Parsi as the basis for his whole argument about the Obama Administration’s diplomatic failures—still matters. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

It is possible that there will another round of nuclear discussions between the P5+1 and Iran in the near future.  Given the extent to which Israel, the United States, and America’s European partners are ratcheting up tensions over the nuclear issue, one hopes that additional talks would help the parties find a peaceful and productive way forward.  But that is unlikely unless the Western powers are prepared to accept the reality that Iran is enriching uranium, that it will continue enriching uranium, and that it has every right to do so under international law.  We want to highlight a few pieces that have come out recently and make this point.

One is from Peter Jenkins, Britain’s former representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  Peter has published several pieces on Race for Iran, and we have always benefited from his analysis and insights.  Peter’s most recent article, “The Deal the West Could Strike With Iran”, was published in The Telegraph earlier this month, see here.  He rightly attributes what he sees as “a big rise in the twin risks of military action and grave damage to the world economy” to “a great diplomatic over bid:  the West’s demand that Iran surrender its capacity to enrich uranium.” 

Peter charts his personal experience with the Iranian nuclear issue, noting how his own views on the matter have evolved.  He states forthrightly that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) “prohibits the manufacture or acquisition of nuclear weapons.  But it permits the uranium enrichment that has been at the heart of the West’s quarrel with Iran.”  He also notes that, today, “the West is all but isolated in insisting that Iran must not enrich.”  The way out, he writes, is

“a deal along the following lines:  Iran would accept top-notch IAEA safeguards in return for being allowed to continue enriching uranium.  In addition, Iran would volunteer some confidence-building measures to show that it has no intention of making nuclear weapons.

This, essentially, is the deal that Iran offered the UK, France and Germany in 2005.  With hindsight, that offer should have been snapped up.  It wasn’t because our objective was to put a stop to all enrichment in Iran.  That has remained the West’s aim ever since, despite countless Iranian reminders that they are unwilling to be treated as a second-class party to the NPT—with fewer rights than other signatories—and despite all the evidence that the Iranian character is more inclined to defiance than buckling under pressure.” 

One of the main reasons this sort of deal was not “snapped up” by the Europeans in 2005 is that the United States, in the form of the George W. Bush Administration, was not on board.  Since the Obama Administration came to office in 2009, there have been periodic flurries of reports in the media and the work of some commentators on the Obama team’s purported willingness to accept safeguarded enrichment in Iran as a negotiated outcome.  The reports are false.  While there are some Obama Administration officials who would be prepared to accept safeguarded enrichment inside Iran as part of a solution to the nuclear issue, there has never been a consensus within the Administration or a presidential decision to this effect.  U.S. policy, unfortunately, is still “zero enrichment” where Iran is concerned. 

But there is another reason the Europeans did not snap up the deal advanced by Iran in 2005.  One of the more striking dynamics inside the P5+1, since the United States finally joined in multilateral nuclear diplomacy with Tehran in 2006, is that Britain and France have both been very hardline on the enrichment issue, discouraging any flexibility by the United States on the matter.  It seems like London and Paris are both chronically concerned about what the development of potential “threshold” capabilities by important regional powers like Iran would mean for the strategic value of Britain and France’s small nuclear arsenals—and what Iran’s rise portends for the West’s ability to continue dominating the Middle East as it has in the past. 

All of this makes us very skeptical that the United States and its European partners will be prepared to take a fundamentally different approach to nuclear talks with Tehran.  If they are, Peter’s piece shows what such an approach might look like. 

An important element in the current tensions between Iran and the West over the nuclear issue is an extraordinary hyping of the Iranian nuclear “threat” by Western powers and Israel.  In this regard, the most recent IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear activities looms very large.  Peter offers cogent observations about the report in his article, noting that

“the IAEA has not reported evidence of attempts to produce nuclear weapons, or of a decision to do so.  This is hardly surprising, since the key bits of November’s IAEA report were based on material supplied by Western intelligence.  For years, the Western assessment has been that Iran seeks the capability to build nuclear weapons, but has not taken a decision to produce them.” 

Another richly insightful deconstruction of the IAEA’s recent engagement with Iran’s nuclear program was provided earlier this month by Robert Kelley, see here.  Kelley is an American nuclear engineer who worked for 30 years in the University of California’s nuclear weapons laboratories before serving for nine years at the IAEA.  In his article, “Nuclear Arms Charge Against Iran Is No Slam Dunk”, published by Bloomberg, he notes that the “evidence” of an Iranian nuclear weapons program

“is sketchy.  And the way the data have been presented produces a sickly sense of déjà vu.  I am speaking up about this now because, as a member of the IAEA’s Iraq Action Team in 2003, I learned firsthand how withholding the facts can lead to bloodshed.  Having known the details then, though I was not allowed to speak, I feel a certain shared responsibility for the war that killed more than 4,000 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis.  A private citizen today, I hope to help ensure the facts are clear before the U.S. takes further steps that could lead, intentionally or otherwise, to a new conflagration, this time in Iran.” 

Turning a critical eye to the 24-page IAEA report, Kelly points out that “all but three of the items that were offered as proof of a possible nuclear-arms program are either undated or refer to events before 2004.  The agency spends about 96 percent of a 14-page annex reprising what was already known.”   Of the three relatively “new” indications of “possible military dimensions” to the Iranian program, Kelley points out that

“two of the three are attributed only to two member states, so the sourcing is impossible to evaluate.  In addition, their validity is called into question by the agency’s handling of the third piece of evidence.  That evidence, according to the IAEA, tells u Iran embarked on a four-year program, starting around 2006, to validate the design of a device to produce a burst of neutrons that could initiate a fission chain reaction.  Though I cannot say for sure what source the agency is relying on, I can say for certain that this project was earlier at the center of what appeared to be a misinformation campaign. 

In 2009, the IAEA received a two-page document, purporting to come from Iran, describing this same alleged work.  Mohamed ElBaradei, who was then the agency’s director general, rejected the information because there was no chain of custody for the paper, no clear source, document markings, date of issue or anything else that could establish its authenticity.  What’s more, the document contained style errors, suggesting the author was not a native Farsi speaker. It appeared to have been typed using an Arabic, rather than a Farsi, word-processing program.  When ElBaradei put the document in the trash heap, the U.K.’s Times newspaper published it.

This episode had suspicious similarities to a previous case that proved definitively to be a hoax.  In 1995, the IAEA received several documents from the Sunday Times, a sister paper to the Times, purporting to show that Iraq had resumed its nuclear-weapons program in spite of all evidence to the contrary.  The IAEA quickly determined that the documents were elaborate forgeries.  There were mistakes in formatting the documents’ markings, classification and dates, and many errors in language and style indicated the author’s first language was something other than Arabic or Farsi.  Inspections in Iraq later in 1995 confirmed incontrovertibly that there had been no reconstitution of the Iraqi nuclear program.

I regret now that ElBaradei did not speak out more vehemently, before the U.S. went to war, about the 1995 faked documents, additional forgeries provided to the agency in 2003 and other falsifications.  A good man, he had been an international lawyer with years of experience dealing with half-truths and prevarications.  But he was trapped between telling the whole story and overtly insulting the U.S., which supplied 25 percent of the IAEA’s funding.

For example, ElBaradei labeled documents provided to the IAEA about Iraq’s attempts to acquire uranium from Africa “not authentic.”  A better description would have been “blatant and amateurish forgeries.”  He provided evidence that aluminum tubes the U.S. said were for nuclear centrifuges were actually for rockets.  But he did not supply the supporting engineering details publicly.  The truth was lost in the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s scandalous detailing of Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, which was wrong in almost every respect.

ElBaradei’s successor also has fallen short by failing to note in his report the earlier doubts that Iran was continuing to develop a neutron-producing device.  If Amano has found new reasons to overlook the many questionable aspects of this story, he should present them.  Given past doubts about the episode, the agency’s reporting on it should be above reproach. When it comes to accurately accounting for potential diversions of nuclear materials, the IAEA’s main mission, the agency has gone about its work with precision.  It needs to be just as exacting when it delves into allegations about Iran’s weapons intentions.”   

The third and fourth pieces we want to highlight here are by Iranians, and were written as critical responses to Matthew Kroenig’s recent Foreign Affairs article, “Time to Attack Iran:  Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option”, which we, see here, as well as Stephen Walt, see here, and Paul Pillar, see here, have also critiqued.  Kayhan Barzegar, who teaches at the Islamic Azad University in Tehran and whose work has been featured previously on Race For Iran, published “Military Option Is the Worst Possible Scenario” in Iran Review  earlier this month, see here, (it was originally published in Farsi in Tabnak; later Sanaz Tabeafshar, a Ph.D. candidate at the Islamic Azad University, published “Attacking Iran is the Least Good Option, Dr. Kroenig!” in Iran Review , see here. 

Kayhan zeroes in on the same passage in Kroenig’s article that we did—his warning that “a nuclear-armed Iran would immediately limit U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East.”  Kayhan rightly links Kroenig’s “hyperbolic stance regarding the peril of Iran’s nuclear program and portrayal of it as an ‘urgent’ danger” to “neo-conservative ideas previously circulating in the U.S. political establishment as well as uncritical conformity with the Israeli perspective on the issue.” 

–This perspective undergirds Kroenig’s unsubstantiated insistence that Iran’s nuclear activities are inevitably aimed at weaponization. 

–Kayhan notes in response that

“Tehran’s recent measures to move its sophisticated centrifuges to the Fordo site in Qom, announced the opening of a new nuclear site, and recently making nuclear fuel rods and plates for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) and so on have been taken with the aim of creating ‘political equality’ in the nuclear negotiations with the West.” 

Of course, that is precisely what London, Paris, and Washington do not want—for Iran to achieve something approaching “political equality” in its dealings with the West.  Kayhan points out that, if one were really serious about dealing with nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, one would embrace the idea of nuclear weapons free zone (NWFZ) in the region, noting that, according to a recent World Public Opinion poll, “64 percent of the Israeli public favors a NWFZ in the Middle East, mostly [as a way] of checking Iran’s nuclear program.”  But that idea is not going to get serious consideration by Western governments anytime soon. 

As to a possible attack against Iran, by either the United States or Israel, Kayhan graciously recalls that,

“as the Leveretts precisely argue, the military attack is only justified on the basis of the peaceful enrichment activities of Iran, to which it is entitled according to the [NPT].  One should perceive that such a perspective aims mostly to preserve the nuclear monopoly of the Israeli regime in the Middle East.” 

More broadly, Kayhan underscores how Kroenig

“once again falls into the trap of traditional and simplistic self-contradiction typical of the neo-conservative way of thinking which holds that the United States enjoys indefinite military power and can advance its objectives by means or war, a conception which has helped to prolong the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…the author conceives that Washington can launch a military offense against Iran successfully and pull out of the conflict easily without having to suffer any dire consequences.” 

Kayhan lays out multiple reasons why such a conception is highly fanciful. 

Sanaz Tabeafshar, in her critique of Kroenig’s article, picks up on some of Kayhan’s broader strategic themes, noting that

“after the withdrawal of the American troops from Iraq, a strategic deal between the U.S. and Afghan government, the Arab spring and isolation of Turkey from the Middle East, the territorial swath controlled by Iran has extended from western Afghanistan up to the Mediterranean Sea…With or without any so-called nuclear bomb, Iran’s direct or indirect way of pursuing its foreign policy has, according to Greg Bruno of the Council on Foreign Relations, made ‘a veto holding power on Middle Eastern peace’.” 

We, of course, have argued for some time that Iran’s rising regional influence bolsters the imperatives for U.S. rapprochement with the Islamic Republic.  As Tabeafshar underscores, this also reinforces the sheer foolhardiness of a unilateral strike against Iranian nuclear targets.  She points out that, if Iran were attacked, beyond closing the Strait of Hormuz or launching missiles, Tehran could confront the United States and its partners with “the uprising of Shias through the religious decree of jihad which would be extended out of the region and will come off with proxy attacks against U.S. military installations.”  Moreover, “even in the best case scenario of a strike that, say, set back the Iranian peaceful nuclear program by 2 or 3 years, the Iranians would reseed it with much legitimacy and urgency that only come from having been attacked by an outside power.” 

The case for serious U.S. diplomacy with Iran could not be clearer.  But seriousness, in this context, will require very significant changes in U.S. policy and Washington’s overarching attitude about the Islamic Republic.  We hope that we are wrong, but we do not think it likely that the Obama Administration will be up for this, especially not at the President continues his re-election bid. 

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Hillary appeared on Konflikt (Conflict), Swedish Radio’s in-depth foreign affairs program, to talk about her experience as an American diplomat negotiating with Iranian counterparts over Afghanistan and how that experience informs her current views about U.S. and Iranian strategies in the Middle East today.   You can listen to the interview, which is in English after a very brief introduction in Swedish, by clicking: here.

–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett