[Mb-civic] A Darker Shadow Than Iraq

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-mead25jul25.story

IRAN

A Darker Shadow Than Iraq
 By Walter Russell Mead
 Walter Russell Mead, a contributing editor to Opinion and a senior fellow
at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author, most recently, of
"Power, Terror, Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy

 July 25, 2004

 NEW YORK ‹ Americans and the two major presidential candidates have reached
a consensus on the Middle East: We would like it to go away and stop
bothering us for a while. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.

 The trouble isn't coming from the usual suspects. Despite continuing
low-level violence, Iraq seems to be settling down a bit under the interim
government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whose success at gaining
international legitimacy has made Iraq less of an issue in the rest of the
world. With the Israelis negotiating a possible coalition government, and
the Palestinians consumed by their own political crisis, both sides in the
Middle East's longest and bitterest dispute seem too preoccupied to launch a
major new international crisis.

 Iraq and the unhappy cotenants of the Holy Land will no doubt be heard from
again, but there's a larger and darker shadow over the Middle East, one that
neither the U.S. nor anybody else has a clear idea of what to do. The
problem is Iran ‹ or, rather, Iran's effort to get nuclear weapons.

 What Saddam Hussein was accused of ‹ building and stockpiling weapons of
mass destruction in violation of international obligations and harboring and
cooperating with terrorists ‹ Iran does. Its links to Al Qaeda seem both
more extensive than Hussein's and better documented.

 Moreover, Iran's statements about the nuclear weapons it hopes to build are
far from reassuring. In December 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi
Rafsanjani said the "application of an atom bomb would not leave anything in
Israel" but would produce only "damages" in the Muslim world. After the
nuclear destruction of Israel, Rafsanjani said, "Jews shall expect to once
again be scattered and wandering around the globe."

 Nobody in the United States wants a confrontation with Iran. An independent
Council on Foreign Relations task force, co-chaired by former national
security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former CIA Director Robert M.
Gates, calls for closer engagement with Iran in the hope of increased
cooperation. Brzezinski's presence on the task force was particularly
significant. As President Carter's national security advisor during the
Iranian hostage crisis, Brzezinski persistently favored a more hawkish
approach to Iran than Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

 The Bush administration, for its part, has treated Iran the way many of its
critics wanted it to treat Iraq: It has supported a European Union
initiative to resolve the nuclear issue in a peaceful way.

 So there's a widespread U.S. consensus to engage Iran in peaceful
negotiations in partnership with Europe. This strategy has one small flaw:
So far, it isn't working.

 European and even Russian pressure on Iran, with the possibility of
additional U.S. pressure down the road, has not persuaded the Iranians to
reassure the world about their nuclear intentions. The diplomats haven't
given up yet ‹ and they shouldn't. There might even be, as the task force
report suggests, some additional carrots to put on the table. Both Iran and
the U.S. have much to gain from ending a generation of hostility and
learning to work together on issues of mutual concern.

 But Americans should ask the hard questions. What happens if Iran continues
to resist European and U.S. efforts to engage over the nuclear issue? To put
it more bluntly, if all the alternatives have been exhausted, if peaceful
engagement doesn't work, are we willing to go to war with Iran to prevent it
from getting nuclear weapons?

 This is probably a tougher question for Democrats than for the Bush
administration. Clearly, the administration isn't spoiling for new crises,
to say nothing of new wars, in the Middle East. But the Bush Doctrine is
pretty clear on this point. Iran is an authoritarian regime pursuing weapons
of mass destruction while maintaining links to terrorists. An administration
faced with an Iran that rejects diplomacy would have to either eat the Bush
Doctrine or press forward toward military confrontation ‹ hoping that
coercive diplomacy, backed up by a credible threat of force, would persuade
Iran's mullahs that compromise was the only option.

 It's unclear how a John Kerry administration would respond. Many scholars
contend that the U.S. can live with a nuclear Iran. They say nuclear weapons
have tended to make regimes more responsible, not less, over time. Look at
the Soviet Union and China. Look at India and Pakistan. Beyond this, much of
the Democratic Party's base believes that Iraq was one Middle Eastern war
too many to fight for the Bush Doctrine.

 Yet the political pressure on a Kerry White House to stop Iran's drive for
nuclear weapons would be intense. A nuclear Iran threatening genocidal
strikes against Israel while flirting with terror groups sworn to destroy
the U.S. is not exactly the kind of Middle East that Democrats want.

 Many Democrats (and quite a few Republicans) hope there's an intermediate
step between failed negotiations and coercive diplomacy backed by the threat
of force. If negotiations break down, wouldn't the U.N. Security Council
impose sanctions that would make Iran reconsider?

 Let's hope so, but once again let's look at the facts. France and Russia
have large commercial interests at stake in Iran, they have their own
political agendas in the Middle East and they may not see a nuclear Iran as
threatening their interests in the way Americans do. France and/or Russia
might block any sanctions tough enough to work. We may find that the most we
can get from the United Nations would be "slap on the wrist" sanctions that
anger and insult Iran but don't reduce its ability to go nuclear.

 The U.S. may wind up facing in Iran the choice our intelligence agencies
told us we faced in Iraq: between military action against a rogue regime or
allowing that regime to assemble an arsenal of nuclear and other weapons of
mass destruction. 

 If we get to that unhappy place, the chances are we will again not get
Security Council backing for military action.

 This choice is not yet inevitable, and the diplomats still have some tricks
up their sleeves, but the U.S. is closer than many think to what could well
be the biggest and most difficult crisis in the war on terror yet.


If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives.

Article licensing and reprint options




 Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times