[Mb-civic] FW: Taking on Tehran

[Golsorkhi]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Kay Zafar <kzii at swbell.net>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:53:45 -0600
To: G-1 <kzii at swbell.net>, Konrad Kikuchi <konradkikuchi at yahoo.com>
Subject: FW: Taking on Tehran


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> http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050301faessay84204/kenneth-pollack-ray-takeyh/
> taking-on-tehran.html?mode=print
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> Taking on Tehran
> By Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takeyh
> From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005
> 
> Summary: If Washington wants to derail Iran's nuclear program, it must take
> advantage of a split in Tehran between hard-liners, who care mostly about
> security, and pragmatists, who want to fix Iran's ailing economy. By promising
> strong rewards for compliance and severe penalties for defiance, Washington
> can strengthen the pragmatists' case that Tehran should choose butter over
> bombs. 
> Kenneth Pollack is Director of Research at the Saban Center for Middle East
> Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of The Persian Puzzle: The
> Conflict Between Iran and America. Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow in Middle
> East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
> 
> THE TICKING CLOCK
> 
> Even as the United States struggles to fix the troubled reconstruction of
> Iraq, the next big national security crisis has already descended on
> Washington. Investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
> have discovered that Iran is trying to acquire the capability to enrich
> uranium and separate plutonium, activities that would allow it to make fissile
> material for nuclear weapons. Revelations of Iran's massive secret program
> have convinced even doubtful European governments that Tehran's ultimate aim
> is to acquire the weapons or, at least, the ability to produce them whenever
> it wants. 
> 
> It is an open question whether the United States could learn to coexist with a
> nuclear Iran. Since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, Tehran's
> behavior has conveyed some very mixed messages to Washington. The mullahs have
> continued to define their foreign policy in opposition to the United States
> and have often resorted to belligerent methods to achieve their aims. They
> have tried to undermine the governments of Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies
> in the Middle East; they have waged a relentless terrorist campaign against
> the U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace process; and they have even
> sponsored at least one direct attack against the United States, bombing the
> Khobar Towers--a housing complex filled with U.S. troops--in Saudi Arabia in
> 1996. Although Tehran has been aggressive, anti-American, and murderous, its
> behavior has been neither irrational nor reckless. It has calibrated its
> actions carefully, showed restraint when the risks were high, and pulled back
> when threatened with painful consequences. Such calculations suggest that the
> United States could probably deter Iran even after it crossed the nuclear
> threshold. 
> 
> There is no question, however, that the United States, the Middle East, and
> probably the rest of the world would be better off if they did not have to
> deal with a nuclear Iran. The hard part, of course, is making sure that Tehran
> never gets to that point. It appears to have made considerable progress in
> many aspects of its nuclear program, thanks to extensive assistance from
> Chinese, Germans, Pakistanis, Russians, and perhaps North Koreans. Iran's
> clerical regime has also shown itself willing to endure considerable
> sacrifices to achieve its most important objectives.
> 
> Yet there is reason to believe that Tehran's course can still be changed, if
> Washington takes advantage of the regime's vulnerabilities. Although Iran's
> hard-line leadership has maintained a remarkable unity of purpose in the face
> of reformist challengers, it is badly fragmented over key foreign policy
> issues, including the importance of nuclear weapons. At one end of the
> spectrum are the hardest of the hard-liners, who disparage economic and
> diplomatic considerations and put Iran's security concerns ahead of all
> others. At the opposite end are pragmatists, who believe that fixing Iran's
> failing economy must trump all else if the clerical regime is to retain power
> over the long term. In between these camps waver many of Iran's most important
> power brokers, who would prefer not to have to choose between bombs and
> butter.
> 
> This split provides an opportunity for the United States, and its allies in
> Europe and Asia, to forge a new strategy to derail Iran's drive for nuclear
> weapons. The West should use its economic clout to strengthen the hand of
> Iranian pragmatists, who could then argue for slowing, limiting, or shelving
> Tehran's nuclear program in return for the trade, aid, and investment that
> Iran badly needs. Only if the mullahs recognize that they have a stark
> choice--they can have nuclear weapons or a healthy economy, but not
> both--might they give up their nuclear dreams. With concern over Iran's
> nuclear aspirations growing, the United States and its allies now have a
> chance to present Iran with just such an ultimatum.
> 
> THE GREAT DIVIDE
> 
> Iran's conservative bloc is riddled with factions and their contradictions.
> But whereas reformers and conservatives differ over domestic issues, the
> divisions within the conservative faction chiefly relate to critical foreign
> policy issues. Stalwarts of the Islamic revolution launched by Ayatollah
> Khomeini in 1979 still control Iran's judiciary, the Council of Guardians (the
> constitution's watchdog), and other powerful institutions, as well as key
> coercive groups such as the Revolutionary Guards and the Islamic vigilantes of
> the Ansar-e-Hezbollah. The hard-liners consider themselves the most ardent
> Khomeini disciples and think of the revolution less as an antimonarchical
> rebellion than as a continued uprising against the forces that once sustained
> the U.S. presence in Iran: Western imperialism, Zionism, and Arab despotism.
> Ayatollah Mahmood Hashemi Shahroudi, the chief of the judiciary, said in 2001,
> "Our national interests lie with antagonizing the Great Satan. We condemn any
> cowardly stance toward America and any word on compromise with the Great
> Satan." For ideologues like him, international ostracism is the necessary
> price for revolutionary affirmation.
> 
> The pragmatists among Khomeini's heirs believe that the regime's survival
> depends on a more judicious international course. Thanks to them, Iran
> remained a regular player in the global energy market even at the height of
> its revolutionary fervor. Today, these realists gravitate around the
> influential former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and occupy key positions
> throughout the national security establishment. One of the group's leading
> figures, Muhammad Javad Larijani, a former legislator, argues, "We should not
> have what I would call an obstinate policy toward the world." Instead, the
> pragmatic conservatives have tried to develop economic and security
> arrangements with foreign powers such as China, the European Union, and
> Russia. In reaction to the United States' overthrow of two regimes on Iran's
> periphery--in Afghanistan and Iraq--they have adopted a wary but moderate
> stance. Admonishing his more radical brethren, Rafsanjani, for example, has
> warned, "We are facing a cruel and powerful U.S. government, and we have to be
> cautious and awake."
> 
> In a similar vein, the issue of Iraq is also fracturing the theocratic regime.
> In the eyes of Iran's reactionaries, the Islamic Republic's ideological
> mission demands that the revolution be exported to its pivotal Arab (and
> majority Shiite) neighbor. Such an act would not only establish the continued
> relevance of Iran's original Islamic vision but also secure a critical ally
> for an increasingly isolated Tehran. In contrast, the approach of Tehran's
> realists is conditioned by the requirements of the nation-state and its
> demands for stability. For this cohort, the most important task at hand is to
> prevent Iraq's simmering religious and ethnic tensions from engulfing Iran.
> Instigating Shiite uprisings, dispatching suicide squads, and provoking
> unnecessary confrontations with the United States hardly serves Iran's
> interests at a time when its own domestic problems are deepening. As a result,
> Tehran's mainstream leadership has mostly encouraged Iraq's Shiite groups to
> participate in reconstruction, not to obstruct U.S. efforts, and to do
> everything possible to avoid civil war. Hard-liners, meanwhile, have won
> permission to provide some assistance to Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and
> other Shiite rejectionists.
> 
> Teetering between the two camps is Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah
> Seyed Ali Khamenei. As the theocracy's top ideologue, he shares the
> hard-liners' revolutionary convictions and their confrontational impulses. But
> as the head of state, he must safeguard Iran's national interests and temper
> ideology with statecraft. In his 16 years as supreme leader, Khamenei has
> attempted to balance the ideologues and the realists, empowering both factions
> to prevent either from achieving a preponderance of influence. Lately,
> however, the Middle East's changing political topography has forced his hand
> somewhat. With the American imperium encroaching menacingly on Iran's
> frontiers, Khamenei, one of the country's most hawkish thinkers, is being
> forced to lean toward the pragmatists on some issues.
> 
> THE NUCLEAR CARD
> 
> More than any other issue, the pursuit of nuclear weapons has exacerbated
> tensions within Iran's clerical estate. The theocratic elite generally agrees
> that Iran should maintain a nuclear research program that could eventually
> allow it to build a bomb. After all, now that Washington has proved willing to
> put its provocative doctrine of military pre-emption into practice, Iran's
> desire for nuclear weapons makes strategic sense. And Tehran cannot be
> entirely faulted for rushing to acquire them. When the Bush administration
> invaded Iraq, which was not yet nuclearized, and avoided using force against
> North Korea, which already was, Iranians came to see nuclear weapons as the
> only viable deterrent to U.S. military action.
> 
> Although Iranian leaders agree on the strategic value of a strong nuclear
> program, they are divided over just how strong it should be. Conservative
> ideologues press for a nuclear breakout in defiance of international opinion,
> whereas conservative realists argue that restraint best serves Iran's
> interests. The ideologues, who view a conflict with the United States as
> inevitable, believe that the only way to ensure the survival of the Islamic
> Republic--and its ideals--is to equip it with an independent nuclear
> capability. Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, a conservative presidential candidate in
> 1997 and now an influential adviser to Khamenei, dismissed Tehran's recent
> negotiations with the Europeans, noting, "Fortunately, the opinion polls show
> that 75 to 80 percent of Iranians want to resist and [to] continue our program
> and reject humiliation." In the cosmology of such hard-liners, nuclear arms
> have not only strategic value, but also currency in domestic politics. Iranian
> conservatives see their defiance of the Great Satan as a means of mobilizing
> nationalistic opinion behind a revolution that has gradually lost popular
> legitimacy. 
> 
> In contrast, the clerical realists warn that, with Iran under intense
> international scrutiny, any act of provocation by Tehran would lead other
> states to embrace Washington's punitive approach and further isolate the
> theocratic regime. In an interview in 2002, the pragmatic minister of defense,
> Ali Shamkhani, warned that the "existence of nuclear weapons will turn us into
> a threat to others that could be exploited in a dangerous way to harm our
> relations with the countries of the region." The economic dimension of nuclear
> diplomacy is also pushing the pragmatists toward restraint, as Iran's feeble
> economy can ill afford the imposition of multilateral sanctions. "If there
> [are] domestic and foreign conflicts, foreign capital will not flow into the
> country," Rafsanjani has warned. "In fact, such conflicts will lead to the
> flight of capital from this country."
> 
> IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID
> 
> Despite ample natural resources, Iran continues to suffer double-digit rates
> of inflation and unemployment. A million young Iranians enter the job market
> every year, but the economy produces less than half that many jobs. The
> clerics' penchant for centralization has bred an inefficient command economy
> with a bloated bureaucracy. Extensive subsidies for basic commodities, such as
> wheat and gasoline, waste tens of billions of dollars but do little to
> alleviate poverty. Massive foundations that are philanthropic only in name
> monopolize key sectors of the economy, operating with little competition,
> regulation, or taxation. Inefficient state-owned enterprises drain the
> government budget, and a vast gray market of commercial entities has been spun
> off from government ministries. The recent increase in oil prices is not a
> long-term solution to Iran's woes; the economy's flaws run much too deep.
> Twenty-five years after Iran's revolution pledged to deliver a more just
> society, the Islamic Republic has spawned an economy that benefits only an
> elite group of clerics and their cronies and stifles private enterprise.
> 
> Reform is possible, but it would require selling off public enterprises and
> scaling back the government's onerous subsidies. Iran's clerical elite is too
> implicated in corrupt arrangements and too fearful of losing its prerogatives
> to endorse measures that would fundamentally alter the structure of the
> economy. Concerns that an aggressive privatization program would unleash
> popular dissatisfaction are discouraging reform. Any attempt to restructure
> the public sector would exacerbate an already inflamed unemployment crisis.
> The reactionary Council of Guardians is unlikely to countenance privatizing
> key sectors such as the banking industry, as such measures run counter to
> Iran's constitution. And a serious campaign against corruption would alienate
> the regime's remaining loyalists.
> 
> Iran's technocrats recognize the country's deepening economic predicament.
> Muhammad Khazai, the deputy minister of economy and finance, has acknowledged
> that Iran will need $20 billion in investment every year for the next five
> years if it is to provide sufficient jobs for its citizens. The oil
> industry--the lifeblood of Iran's economy--faces an even more daunting
> challenge. The National Iranian Oil Company estimates that $70 billion is
> needed over the next ten years to modernize the country's dilapidated
> infrastructure and is counting on foreign oil companies and international
> capital markets to provide approximately three-quarters of those massive
> investments. Given the clerical elite's inability to reform the economy,
> foreign investments have become critical to Iran's economic revival. Khazai
> insists, "We should be thinking of drawing foreign investments and [of]
> prepar[ing] the ground for [an] inflow of foreign capital."
> 
> Some officials have gone so far as to suggest that Iran's economic
> difficulties cannot be redressed if Tehran continues to have such a tense
> relationship with the United States. The exasperated head of the Management
> and Planning Organization, Hamid Reza Baradaran Shoraka, has noted that among
> the major obstacles to the country's development are the economic sanctions
> imposed by Washington. Continued antagonism toward the United States would
> hardly ensure that these sanctions are lifted.
> 
> As a result, the realists have tried to leverage Iran's nuclear intentions to
> secure a more favorable security and economic relationship with the United
> States. Like the North Korean leadership, Iran's clerical oligarchs are hoping
> to use Tehran's nuclear ambitions to force negotiations with and extract
> concessions from Washington. In a press conference in September, the powerful
> secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Hasan Rowhani,
> acknowledged that Tehran had held constructive talks with U.S. officials on
> the war in Afghanistan and suggested that "such negotiations on the nuclear
> file [are] not totally out of [the] question." Fearful that Iran's feeble
> economy could not withstand more multilateral sanctions, Iran's pragmatists
> are willing to back down on the nuclear question to help save the economy.
> 
> So far, these competing pressures have resulted in inconsistent government
> positions. Even as it has agreed to suspend efforts to acquire nuclear
> capabilities, the Iranian government has insisted that it would never give up
> its nuclear weapons program and, in fact, has prodded it along. Meanwhile, in
> an attempt to head off international sanctions, Khamenei has temporarily sided
> with the realists. Despite calls by clerical firebrands and the Iranian
> parliament to discard the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), in October 2003, he
> agreed that Tehran would sign the NPT's Additional Protocol, including
> provisions for a fairly intrusive inspection regime. Last November, Tehran
> also accepted a deal brokered by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom to
> suspend uranium-enrichment activities and forgo completion of the nuclear fuel
> cycle.
> 
> A NEW APPROACH
> 
> With Tehran divided over how to balance its nuclear ambitions with its
> economic needs, Washington has an opportunity to keep it from crossing the
> nuclear threshold. Since the economy is a growing concern for the Iranian
> leadership, Washington can boost its leverage by working with the states that
> are most important to Tehran's international economic relations: the western
> European countries and Japan, as well as Russia and China, if they can be
> persuaded to cooperate. Together, these states must raise the economic stakes
> of Iran's nuclear aspirations. They must force Tehran to confront a painful
> choice: either nuclear weapons or economic health. Painting Tehran's
> alternatives so starkly will require dramatically raising both the returns it
> would gain for compliance and the price it would pay for defiance.
> 
> In the past, dissension among the United States and its allies allowed Tehran
> to circumvent this difficult choice. Throughout the 1990s, the United States
> pursued a strategy of pure coercion toward Iran, with strong sanctions and a
> weak covert action program. In the meantime, the Europeans refused even to
> threaten to cut their commercial relations with Tehran, no matter how bad its
> behavior became. Iran played Europe off against the United States, using
> European economic largesse to mitigate the effects of U.S. sanctions, all the
> while making considerable progress with its clandestine nuclear program.
> 
> Today, the situation is different. A fortunate result of Iran's unfortunate
> nuclear progress is that Tehran will now have a much harder time hedging.
> Revelations that Iran has moved closer toward producing fissile material over
> the past two years could help forge a unified Western position. In the 1990s,
> Europeans could ignore much of Iran's malfeasance because the evidence was
> ambiguous. But with the IAEA recently having uncovered so many of Iran's
> covert enrichment activities--and with Tehran subsequently having admitted
> them--it will be far more uncomfortable, if not impossible, for Europeans to
> keep looking the other way. It is still unclear just how seriously Europe
> takes Iran's nuclear activities, but in public and private statements,
> European officials no longer try to play them down. Moreover, when during
> negotiations with the EU in November Tehran requested that 20 research
> centrifuges remain active, the Europeans refused. Such resolve marked a
> drastic departure from Europe's fecklessness during the 1990s. That Tehran
> quickly complied was a sure sign that it fears incurring the wrath of its
> economic benefactors.
> 
> It may now be possible to fashion a multilateral policy that can persuade
> Tehran to abandon its nuclear program. Working together, the United States and
> its allies should lay out two dramatically diverging paths for Iran. On one
> course, Iran would agree to give up its nuclear program, accept a
> comprehensive inspection regime, and end its support for terrorism. In
> exchange, the United States would lift sanctions and settle Iran's claims over
> the assets of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The West would also consider
> bringing Iran into international economic organizations such as the World
> Trade Organization, granting Iran increased commercial ties, and perhaps even
> providing it with economic assistance. Western nations could sweeten the deal
> by agreeing to assist Iran with its energy needs (the ostensible reason for
> its nuclear research program) and to forswear direct military attack. The
> United States could also help create a new security architecture in the
> Persian Gulf in which Iranians, Arabs, and Americans would find cooperative
> ways to address their security concerns, much as Washington did with the
> Russians in Europe during the 1970s and the 1980s. If, on the other hand, Iran
> decided to stay its current course, U.S. allies would join Washington in
> imposing precisely the sort of sanctions the mullahs fear would scuttle Iran's
> precarious economy. These sanctions could take the form of everything from
> barring investment in specific projects or entire sectors (such as the oil
> industry) to severing all commercial contacts with Iran if it proved utterly
> unwilling to address Western demands.
> 
> UPPING THE ANTE
> 
> In an ideal world, the Iranians would agree to work out all their differences
> with the West in a single grand bargain. Such a comprehensive deal would serve
> Washington well, as it would be the fastest way to resolve current disputes
> and the surest platform from which to build a new, cooperative relationship.
> In fact, under the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill
> Clinton, Washington repeatedly offered such an approach. But conservative
> ideologues in Tehran repeatedly quashed the efforts of any Iranian who
> attempted to take up the United States' conciliatory offers. The Clinton
> administration made nearly a dozen unilateral gestures toward Iran, including
> the partial lifting of sanctions, to enable the reformist government of
> President Muhammad Khatami to participate in such negotiations. But these
> overtures triggered a conservative backlash that eventually debilitated
> Khatami's government.
> 
> Even if a grand bargain seems unlikely given Iran's complicated domestic
> politics, a policy of true "carrots and sticks" remains a viable option. In
> this case, Western nations would lay out the same two paths for Iran but would
> do so as statements of a joint policy, rather than as the goals of bilateral
> negotiations with Tehran. Officials from the United States, European
> countries, and Japan--as well as from any other country willing to
> participate, including China and Russia--would explicitly define what they
> expect Iran to do and not do. To each of these actions, the allies would
> attach positive and negative inducements (the "carrots" and the "sticks"), so
> that Tehran could clearly understand both the benefits it would gain from
> ending nuclear and terrorist activities and the penalties it would suffer for
> refusing to end them.
> 
> Such an effort will not be easy. The United States and its allies will have a
> hard time defining clear benchmarks to measure Iran's compliance, and they
> will likely disagree over how much to reward or punish Tehran at each step.
> But the approach can work, so long as a few critical measures are applied.
> 
> First, the strategy requires that both the potential rewards and the potential
> penalties be significant. Iranian hard-liners will not abandon their nuclear
> program easily. Although the mullahs are not as stubborn as North Korean
> leader Kim Jong Il continues to be--they would not knowingly allow three
> million fellow citizens to die of starvation just to preserve their nuclear
> program--they unquestionably are willing to tolerate considerable hardship to
> keep their nuclear hopes alive. In order to change Tehran's behavior,
> therefore, the inducements will have to be potent: big rewards that could
> revive the economy or heavy sanctions that would surely cripple it.
> 
> Second, Tehran must be presented with the prospect of serious rewards, not
> just punishments; Washington must be willing to make concessions to Iran in
> return for real concessions from it. The most obvious reason for this
> condition is that the Europeans insist on it. European diplomats have
> consistently said that they can persuade their reluctant governments to
> threaten serious sanctions for Iran's continued misbehavior only if the United
> States agrees to reward compliance with real economic benefits.
> 
> The carrots, moreover, need to be as big as the sticks. Only the prospect of
> significant bonuses will provide ammunition to pragmatists in Tehran who argue
> that Iran should revise its nuclear stance to secure the benefits necessary to
> revitalize its troubled economy. Current levels of trade and investment from
> Europe and Japan have not been adequate to solve Iran's deep-seated economic
> problems. The pragmatists' case will become convincing only if Tehran's
> compliance with Western demands can help the Iranian economy do better than it
> does now. Granting enough economic concessions to maintain the status quo
> probably would not sway undecided Iranians; significantly more generous
> incentives might.
> 
> The painful experience of trying to make the Iraq sanctions stick during the
> 1990s suggests another prerequisite for the approach that must be adopted with
> Tehran. One of the lessons learned from Iraq was that, although many
> governments threatened Saddam Hussein with sanctions if he defied the
> international community, few imposed them when he did. Spelling out in advance
> all of the steps Tehran is expected to take or to avoid, as well as the
> specific rewards and punishments they would incur, is the best way to prevent
> Iran and U.S. allies from reneging on their commitments as they did in Iraq.
> 
> Last, all incentives must be applied in graduated increments, so that small
> steps, positive or negative, would bring Tehran commensurate gains or
> sanctions. For Iranians to even consider forgoing their nuclear ambitions,
> they will need to see tangible gains from the start, as well as be able to
> point to a pot of gold at the end. Conversely, Tehran probably will not change
> course if it does not systematically suffer increasingly severe consequences
> for its reticence. Without immediate and automatic penalties, it is likely to
> act as it did throughout the 1990s, dismissing the West's promises and
> warnings as empty rhetoric while continuing to advance its program under the
> status quo. 
> 
> THE LEAST BAD OPTION
> 
> There is, of course, no guarantee that such an approach will persuade Tehran
> to end its nuclear projects or its support for terrorism. Even if Iran does
> halt these projects, the strategy is far from perfect: at the very least, it
> will require Washington to live for some time longer with a regime it abhors.
> But by setting out clearly the rewards Iran would accrue for cooperating and
> the penalties it would suffer for bucking, a carrots-and-sticks policy would
> force Iran's leadership to confront the choice it never wanted to make:
> whether to shelve its nuclear program or risk the crippling of its economy.
> Because Iran's economic woes have been a major factor in popular discontent
> with the regime, there is good reason to believe that, if forced to make such
> a choice, Tehran would grudgingly opt to save its economy and look for other
> ways to deal with its security and foreign policy aspirations.
> 
> This approach also is the best available, for it has a much greater chance of
> succeeding than the alternatives. Invading Iran simply should not be an
> option; Washington should not try to deal with Tehran's nuclear program and
> its support for terrorism as it did with the Taliban and Saddam's regime. The
> United States is now in the thick of reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq,
> leaving it with very limited forces available to invade another country.
> Iran's mountainous terrain and large, nationalistic population would likely
> make any military campaign daunting. Postwar reconstruction would be even more
> complex and debilitating there than it has been in Afghanistan and Iraq.
> 
> Although most Iranians want a different type of government than they have and
> a better relationship with the United States, it would be foolhardy to believe
> that Washington could solve its problems with Tehran's nuclear ambitions by
> staging a coup or inciting a popular revolution to topple the current regime.
> Young Iranians seem to have a better image of the United States than their
> elders did, but their greater open-mindedness should not be confused with a
> desire to see U.S. interference in Iranian politics, something Iranians have
> responded to with ferocity in the past. Furthermore, although many Iranians
> may want a different government, they have shown little inclination to do what
> would be necessary to dislodge the current one. Most are weary of revolutions:
> when they had the chance to start one, amid student demonstrations in the
> summer of 1999, few heeded the call. There is good reason to believe that this
> regime's days are numbered, but little to think that it will fall soon enough
> or that the United States can do much to speed its demise. Advocating regime
> change might be a useful adjunct to a new Iran policy, but it will not solve
> Washington's immediate problems with Iran's nuclear program and its support
> for terrorism.
> 
> Likewise, at present, the costs, uncertainties, and risks of waging an air
> campaign to destroy Iran's nuclear sites are too great to make it anything but
> a measure of last resort--the hopes of some in the Bush administration
> notwithstanding. Because Tehran has managed to conceal major nuclear
> facilities, it is unclear by how much even successful bombing could set back
> the country's nuclear development. Moreover, no matter how little damage it
> suffered, Iran would likely retaliate. It has the most capable terrorist
> network in the world, and the United States would have to stand ready for a
> full onslaught of attacks. Perhaps even more important, a U.S. military
> campaign would probably prompt Tehran to unleash a clandestine war on U.S.
> forces in Iraq. The Iranians are hardly omnipotent there, but they could make
> the situation far more miserable and deadly than it already is. Without better
> intelligence about Iran's nuclear program and better protection against an
> Iranian counterattack, the idea of a U.S. air campaign should be kept on the
> shelf as a last-ditch option.
> 
> Iran today is at a crossroads. It might restrain its nuclear ambitions to the
> parameters set out in the NPT, or it might rashly cross the threshold,
> brandishing the bomb as a tool of revolutionary diplomacy. It might play a
> positive role in rebuilding a stable Iraq, or it might be a dogmatic actor
> that exacerbates Iraq's sectarian and ethnic cleavages. As difficult as the
> U.S. predicament is in Iraq today, Tehran could make it much worse: it could
> dramatically inflame the insurgency and destabilize its already insecure
> neighbor. Since the demise of Saddam Hussein, Iran has dispatched clerics and
> Revolutionary Guards to Iraq and released funds to establish an intricate
> network of influence there. It is still unclear what the theocracy's specific
> goals are, but there is concern that they could be at odds with those of the
> United States.
> 
> Much now depends on Washington's conduct, the security environment that
> emerges in the region, and the extent to which Washington and its allies can
> force Tehran to choose between its nuclear ambitions and its economic
> well-being. Given Iran's economic frailty and shifting power dynamics within
> its leadership, a strategy offering strong rewards and severe penalties has a
> reasonable chance of discouraging Tehran from its nuclear plans, especially if
> the Europeans and the Japanese are willing to participate in full. In fact, it
> is the only plan that has any real prospect of success at present. Rather than
> continue to criticize everyone else's Iran policy, the United States should
> stop making perfect the enemy of good enough. Washington has a chance to curb
> Tehran's alarming behavior, with the help of its allies and without resort to
> force. If it does not seize the opportunity now, at some point soon it will
> likely wish it had.
> 
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