“… the 31-year gridlock in Iranian-American relations endures. Sarah Palin, no less, is now urging Obama to “declare war on Iran” to save his presidency. She’s not alone. Daniel Pipes, the conservative commentator, called a recent National Review column: “How to save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran.”
There’s nothing new in U.S. hawks reducing Iran to a nuclear abstraction, its 70 million citizens subsumed into a putative warhead, its civilization ignored and its historical grievances against the United States glossed over — all in the name of making Persia a U.S. electoral pawn and a threat that demands bombs.
But the war option remains unthinkable, a potential disaster for the United States and Israel. It’s therefore worth outlining, before the drumbeat intensifies in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, 10 truths about Iran.
1.Iran’s hardliners thrive on isolation. The game-changing pursuit of dialogue with Iran is not incompatible with support of the Green movement; rather it complements that backing…..
2. The Iranian response to Obama has been erratic, not least in the aborted Geneva deal of Oct. 1, 2009, that would have seen Iran’s low enriched uranium (L.E.U.) shipped out the country and the eventual return of uranium enriched to 20 percent (well below weapons grade) for use in a Tehran medical research reactor. The crumbling of this accord, victim of Iran’s political divisions, left Obama and his top Iran aides bitterly frustrated. They are to this day. It would have created breathing space for broader talks.
But Iran says the idea is alive: “We think all parties have shown their political will to fulfill this exchange” (Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, Feb. 5). ….This deal is still a door opener. Sanctions are a cul-de-sac.
3. Deterrence is powerful. The United States should, as Hillary Clinton has suggested, be building a “defense umbrella” for friendly gulf states alarmed by Iran’s nuclear program. The cleverest remark of Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Iran was: “The only way you end up not having a nuclear-capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons.”…..
4.Sanctions will not alter Iran’s policy, and will further enrich the Revolutionary Guards who control sanction-circumventing channels from Dubai, but they will buy some time for further probing of engagement.
I’m told that’s how Obama, who remains intellectually committed to the idea of an Iran breakthrough, views them: a necessity in the light of Congressional and Israeli pressure, (any difference?) but not a likely means to get sanctions-inured Iran to change course….
5.Attacking Iran has known consequences. Saddam Hussein did so in 1980 — and thereby cemented Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic revolution by uniting diverse factions (socialist, liberal and others) in national defense.
Because the United States and Europe armed Iraq in that war, and Saddam then gassed the Iranians, resentment runs deep: I’ve often been shown war wounds in Tehran on arms and legs as a single word is uttered, “America.” The generation of young officers in that war, like Ahmadinejad, now runs Iran and constitutes the New Right. (Blowback is not limited to Afghanistan.) But most Iranians are under 35 and drawn to the United States.
The one sure way to defeat the Green movement, frustrate Iranian youth, unite Iranians in patriotic defiance, reinforce the New Right, put Iran on a crash course to a bomb, and buttress the regime — as in 1980 — is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Gates has said, “There is no military option that does anything more than buy time” — and not much, at that.
6.Iran’s defiance of U.N. resolutions… Still, I.A.E.A. inspectors are in Iran, …… it is clear that there is still time — at least a couple of years — for a bargain that would persuade Iran to do what Brazil, Argentina and South Africa did before it.
7. The shifts since the June 12 elections are seismic. ….. Iran is far more volatile than a year ago. I doubt that it could manage a peaceful transition were Khamenei, 70, to die…..
8.Israel and Iran are not neighbors. Both are strangers — one Jewish, the other Shiite — in the Sunni Arab sea that is the Middle East. They have never fought a war. They enjoyed everything short of diplomatic relations under the shah and productive relations for a decade after the revolution, when Israel sided with Iran against Iraq. Their enmity is fierce but not inevitable. For Israel, already at war with Arabs, opening a new war front against Persia would be disastrous: Muslim anger would overflow…. U.S. security and the American quest for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan would be compromised. Israel can prevent an Iranian bomb through working with America on measures short of war. Its own large nuclear arsenal and second strike capacity gives it the assurances it needs to pursue that course.
9.A peaceful Iraq, a quieter Afghanistan and any Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement demand Iranian involvement. Outside the tent Iran is a disruptive force. Inside the tent it can help America on multiple fronts and outgrow its violent revolutionary impetuosity. That’s still a game-changing proposition, as radical as the U.S.-China breakthrough of 1972 that changed the world. Obama must shut out the baying crowds and focus on the prize.
10.Iran is the original Heartbreak Hotel. It crushes people with its tragedy. Since at least the 1930s it has veered between forced westernization (“westoxification” to its critics) and theocratic imposition, banning the hijab and then making it compulsory, reaching for pluralism and then crushing it, opening its society and then slamming it shut.
….. It is time for Iran to find the balance between faith and pluralism that has eluded it for a century. It is time for the United States to help Iran’s emergence from isolation — not with Palin’s jingoism, nor empty punishments, nor bombs — but through firmness allied to creative diplomacy and sustained involvement.
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