Brown plans to send British civilian force to conflict zones
· Threats to security wider than during cold war
· Civil protection network to monitor local areas
Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Thursday March 20 2008 Article history
A force of 1,000 civilians including police, members of the emergency services and judges, ready to be deployed to conflict zones around the world, was among a range of proposals in a long-awaited "national security strategy" announced by Gordon Brown yesterday.

The government will publish a "national risk register" to help local authorities and businesses prepare for potential disasters, and promote a civil protection network of local volunteers. A national security forum combining up to 30 private sector experts and academics will advise the existing ministerial national security committee.

The 60-page national security strategy document published by the Cabinet Office described the threats facing Britain as more diffuse than during the cold war. "There is a much broader set of risks and threats," Robert Hannigan, Brown's chief security adviser, said.

Threats to Britain's security range from climate change to cyber attacks to extremism among the young, the document said. Officials said the emphasis on protecting the UK should be as much on local initiatives as on government measures. They gave as an example schools and universities reporting on "radicalisers", comparing it with child protection initiatives.

"Our new approach to security also means improved local resilience against emergencies, building and strengthening local capacity to respond effectively in a range of circumstances from floods to possible terrorism incidents," Brown told MPs. "Not the old cold war idea of civil defence but a new form of civil protection that combines expert preparedness ... with greater local engagement of individuals and families."

Asked if the civil protection network would be similar to second world war ARP (air raid precautions) wardens, who patrolled the streets, a government spokesman said: "It's a variation of that." The network was also likened to a kind of neighbourhood watch scheme.

The document stressed the need to link national authorities with local ones and also the growing interdependence of Britain and the rest of the world.

In his statement to the Commons, the prime minister dwelt on the need to promote civil authority rather than military force.

The 1,000-strong "UK civilian standby capacity" would be set up to help failing states and rebuild countries emerging from conflict, he told MPs. At home, he referred to extra resources the government had given to MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and anti-terrorist police. Abroad, he announced more help for peacekeepers in Africa, including Somalia.

The prime minister also announced plans, drawn up by Des Browne, the defence secretary, for a bonus of £15,000 for armed forces personnel who had served for eight years.

He also said £20m had been set aside to help them on to the housing ladder. The measures would be financed through the defence budget.

Brown also held out the promise of greater openness, by giving a bigger role to parliament's intelligence and scrutiny committee. But it remains unclear if the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ would give evidence to the committee in public.

Brown said Britain would promote nuclear disarmament but the document called for the Trident nuclear weapons system to be retained.

There has been little enthusiasm for the document, which was due to be published at the end of last year, in Whitehall where departments are reluctant to share responsibilities or projects.

Ian Kearns, of the IPPR thinktank, which has published its own national security strategy, described the government's document as "weaker on policy substance and weaker still on necessary changes to the machinery of government".

Study Calls for 'Soft Power' Tactics

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,164334,00.html

Virginian-Pilot | March 19, 2008
Six days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, President Bush went to the wounded Pentagon to prepare military leaders for what he said would be "a long campaign."
"This is a different type of enemy than we're used to," he told reporters. "It's an enemy that likes to hide and burrow in, and their network is extensive. There are no rules. It's barbaric behavior. They slit throats of women on airplanes in order to achieve an objective. That is beyond comprehension."

As the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war this week, the president's grim forecast may be the one thing that critics and admirers can agree he got right.

And regardless of whom Americans elect to succeed Bush, it is clear the campaign will drag on - in Iraq and Afghanistan and on fronts still to be opened.

Conflicts like that in Iraq, against small groups of radical Muslim jihadists, are likely to be the principal threat to U.S. safety for the foreseeable future, according to a new study by The Rand Corp., commissioned by the Pentagon.

But America should not fight those wars as it has fought in Iraq, a growing chorus of uniformed and civilian military analysts contends.

"America's goal must be to defuse such a war, not to wage and win it," the Rand study asserts. "Trying to crush insurgency by military brute force in the Muslim world risks validating the jihadists' claim, increasing their appeal, and replacing their losses."

Force "is but one instrument of counterinsurgency ... It ought to be subordinate to a political strategy of offering the people a government deserving of their support," the report adds.

Unless that political strategy produces a worthy government, the Rand authors say, military success against insurgents is likely to be fleeting.

The case these analysts make for a different approach to today's wars - using doctors, engineers, teachers, bankers, police officers and other civilians as nation-building "warriors" - is attracting considerable attention inside the Pentagon and beginning to generate a buzz on Capitol Hill.

With the price tag for five years in Iraq pushing $1 trillion, by most estimates - to say nothing of the physical and emotional toll the war has taken on service members and their families - there is ample incentive for a new approach.

"Our defense establishment has suffered some 4,000 fatal casualties, forced the Army into offering enlistment bonuses of $40,000 to raw recruits, begun a program of buying armored jeeps that cost a million dollars each, and run up a generational spending obligation" likely to top $2 trillion, writes military theorist Chet Richards, a retired Air Force colonel.

"We did all this not while engaging some worthy foe armed with tanks, missiles and aircraft similar to ours, nor while contending with massed armies of skilled troops on fields of battle. No, we incurred these costs while trying to suppress resistance to our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, resistance by lightly armed civilians and poorly equipped militias."

"Now the generals even say you can't win these things by military means alone," said David Gompert, principal author of the Rand report.

In early March, a group of 52 retired senior military leaders, including six former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced plans to lobby Congress to overhaul and pump billions of dollars into overseas aid programs.

The generals and admirals want lawmakers to create a corps of civilian workers trained and deployed to work directly with the military and help build education, transportation, economic and political systems in troubled countries.

No one knows better than troops how helpful such allies would be in Iraq, retired Marine Gen. Tony Zinni, one of the group's founders, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month.

Zinni's son, a Marine officer serving in Iraq, recently reported that his unit's signature achievement has been helping Iraqis reopen an oil refinery, the general said.

The Marines got the job done, but that's not the kind of work they ought to be doing, the elder Zinni argued.

"We desperately need civilian partners who have the same robust capabilities that we have," he said.

No less an administration leader than Defense Secretary Robert Gates makes essentially the same argument. In a speech last fall to an audience dominated by Army officers, Gates pushed hard for an expansion of America's "soft power," arguing that "the most important military component in the war on terror is not the fighting we do ourselves, but how well we enable and empower our partners to defend and govern themselves."

The Navy, lacking a front-line role in land wars against groups such as al-Qaida, is implementing a new global strategy that recasts it as an arm of diplomacy and a vehicle for humanitarian aid.

More than a year in the making, the strategy argues that the sea service is uniquely positioned to respond to insurgencies. Their ships, Navy leaders argue, can serve as offshore bases from which troops and civilian workers can move inland to quell violence and provide aid without becoming provocative occupiers.

"We believe that preventing wars is as important as winning wars," the chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard declared in a statement accompanying release of the strategy.

Such sentiments are a dramatic shift from the complaints about President Bill Clinton's use of the military for nation-building in Bosnia that marked then-Gov. George W. Bush's campaign for president in 2000.

Yet for all the talk of soft power, or "smart power" in Zinni's formulation, Gompert argued that the $250 million the administration proposes to spend next year on soft-power programs is a sliver of what's needed.

It's also less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the $105 billion Bush has asked Congress to provide for new guns, ships, aircraft, tanks and other weaponry in his 2009 budget. Additional billions are targeted to provide pay and benefits for 92,000 soldiers and Marines that the administration and lawmakers want added to the military by 2012.

Most of those weapons were conceived in an era when the Pentagon assumed it might have to fight a similarly well-equipped national power.

Richards argues that the ownership of nuclear weapons has made wars between such major powers impossible. For other threats, a force the size of today's Marine Corps (about 200,000 troops), combined with a cadre of special operations commandos and enough air and naval support, would be more than adequate to defend America, he says in a new book, "If We Can Keep It."

At perhaps $250 billion per year, that force would cost less than half of today's U.S. military. Richards would spend an additional $50 billion-plus to combine the revamped military with today's diplomatic and intelligence services in a new Department of External Affairs. Its mission would be to rebuild and enhance U.S. intelligence-gathering and processing around the world.

"Defense and intelligence should operate together as an integrated facility for understanding what is going on in the world," Richards writes. And "from time to time and with great finesse and support from our allies," the United States should apply what it learns from all that intelligence and use military force to head off emerging threats and bolster shaky allies, he suggests.

But many in Congress say the United States could once again face an enemy on par with the Soviet Union and cannot afford to drop its guard. They point to China's booming economy and to North Korea's and Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Programs conceived for conventional wars also persist because their advocates say they can be adapted for use against insurgents, Gompert said.

Even the U.S. fleet of nuclear-powered attack submarines, designed and built to safeguard the open sea and equipped with missiles that can hit targets hundreds of miles inland, has been marketed as a weapon against terrorist insurgents, he noted.

Gompert sees Congress as part of the problem. Its military committees are dominated by members who represent districts that are home to major defense contractors and military bases and who are predisposed to question any initiative to redirect defense dollars.

But he argues that for as little as $30 billion, about 5 percent of the current defense budget, Bush's successor could make a start at developing a real soft- power approach to the wars of the future.

The job will not be easy, he acknowledged, and the new president will need special help from civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon to shift substantial money away from established programs and conventional defense.

The status quo, Richards observes, has strong bipartisan support, and the top presidential candidates of both parties are promising to spend even more to rebuild and replace what the military has lost or damaged in Iraq.

He thinks it is up to voters to accept the reality that many of the billions being spent on defense aren't really buying more security and to push the new administration and Congress toward change.

Otherwise, he wrote, "we will elect our democracy right out of existence."

Israel & India: New Allies
Israel, India, Intelligence, Diplomacy, International Relations
Bruce Riedel, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
Middle East Bulletin
MARCH 21, 2008 —
On January 21, 2008 an Indian space launch vehicle lifted off from the Sriharikota spaceport on the Indian Ocean to put into space Israel’s most sophisticated spy satellite ever launched, the Polaris. The commercial launch of Polaris by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) underscored the growing military and intelligence connections between Israel and India. The United States helped inspire this relationship and has a strong interest in its success. Though unique in the military cooperation realm, this is but one of several evolving relationships between Israel and great or emerging powers that deserves attention.
RELATED CONTENT
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
A World without Nukes
Bruce Riedel, The Boston Globe, November 24, 2007
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
India and the United States: A New Era
Bruce Riedel, The Brookings Institution, December 18, 2006
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
Help Pakistanis Now or Risk Alienation
Bruce Riedel, Bangor Daily News, March 13, 2008
More Related Content »
Israel and India only established formal diplomatic relations in 1991 with the Madrid Arab-Israeli peace process creating a favorable diplomatic context for New Delhi to move beyond informal contacts that existed before 1990. Then President Bush’s National Security Council staff worked closely behind the scenes with Prime Minister Rao’s embassy in Washington to make this happen. Military-to-military contacts and defense interaction followed.

In the 1990s, China was Israel’s most important arms export market. The signature weapons system in the relationship was the Phalcon airborne warning and control system (AWACs). This system used U.S. technology in its development and was thus subject to U.S. export oversight. As the 1990s developed and tensions rose in the Taiwan Strait, Washington pressed the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv to cut back on its ties to Beijing. The Phalcon became a bone of contention. Of course, this had serious economic costs for Israel.

In 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak pressed President Clinton for relief. Clinton came back with an idea — if the United States did not like Israeli-Chinese arms deals, it had no objection to Israeli-Indian arms sales since they did not raise the potential issues Taiwan raised. More explicitly, selling the Phalcon to India would not meet objections in Washington. Clinton made clear the United States would not raise concerns about the arms balance with Pakistan since it has no commitment to the defense of Pakistan and the conventional balance of forces was already tipped in India’s favor in 2000. The two leaders talked the issues through on the margins of the Israeli-Palestinian summit at Camp David in mid-2000. They reached agreement and Israel got a green light from Washington to court India.

Now, almost eight years later, India is Israel’s largest arms export market in the world. Sales in 2006 were $1.5 billion, roughly the same as in each of the preceding three years as well. This from Israel’s total arms sales of $4.2 billion in 2006; the India market comprised more than one-third. Sales included upgrades for MIG 21 aircraft and T72 tanks originally purchased from Russia, the Barak anti-missile ship defense system, communications equipment, laser-guided munitions and the Phalcon. The first of five Phalcon AWACs were delivered in 2007. Co-partnerships are now developing between Indian and Israeli firms.

Israeli arms experts are also seeking to sell the Arrow II anti-tactical ballistic missile system to India, which would require U.S. approval due to shared technology in the ATBM system. This would give India a significant missile defense system. The Green Pine radar system has already been sold to India which is a critical component of the overall ATBM system.

The Polaris satellite is Israel’s first equipped with synthetic aperture radar that allows it to take high resolution imagery in all weather conditions. The radar looks through clouds or fog to see objects on the ground. Launched from south India into a polar orbit it offers new coverage of sites in Iran for Israeli defense planners. According to Indian press sources, two more such satellites will be launched by ISRO for Israel in the next few years. The Iranian nuclear program will probably be the principal collection target for these systems. Israel retains full operational control of the Polaris system including what targets are imaged. It is unknown if any intelligence derived from the imagery is shared with third parties.

Critics of the Indian-U.S. civilian nuclear deal negotiated by President Bush and Prime Minister Singh have complained about India’s ties to Iran. India does have important equities with Iran, not the least because India has the second largest population of Shia Muslims in the world after Iran. But there is no comparison between the sophisticated military relationship between India and Israel and the weak connections between India and Iran on security issues.

According to ISRO officials I talked to in Bangalore in February the launch of the Polaris produced a serious protest from Iran to India. But they were clear ISRO would stick with its Israeli commercial connection. They also said India will launch its own first radar-imaging satellite later this year. The Indian Army Chief of Staff, General Depak Kapoor, has said publicly that India’s imagery satellite capability is now critical to the nation’s early warning capability with regards to both Pakistan and China.

The Israeli-Indian connection in commercial military and space intelligence fields is good for both countries and for the United States. In less than two decades since diplomatic ties were upgraded, New Delhi and Jerusalem have come a long way. Camp David was a pivotal moment on the way. The cooperation between Israel and India, with U.S. blessing, provides important security to two democratic countries in a very unstable part of the world

Advancing Religious Freedom and Human Rights in Iran
Iran, Human Rights, Islamic World, Politics
Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom
Save Print E-mail
FEBRUARY 21, 2008 —
Members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today about religious freedom, human rights and U.S. policy options toward Iran. It is a privilege to participate in a serious discussion of this complex issue. Given the scope of our concerns about Tehran’s foreign policy, particularly its nuclear ambitions and involvement with terrorist organizations, security issues inevitably dominate our public discourse on Iran. This does not, however, reflect the complete array of our interests with respect to Iran, and it is important to communicate to both the Iranian leadership and the Iranian people that the broad issues of human rights and civil freedoms rank as a high priority for the United States. In my remarks, I hope to offer some thoughts on the broad trends underway within Iran, highlight several specific points on the situation for human rights and religious freedom today, and provide general recommendations on constructing an approach to this dimension of our policy concerns.
RELATED CONTENT
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
Iran: Reality, Options, and Consequences
Suzanne Maloney, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, November 07, 2007
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
The U.S. Should Engage Iran
Ray Takeyh, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Fall 2007
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
Fear and Loathing in Tehran
Suzanne Maloney, The National Interest, September-October 2007
More Related Content »
Politics and Society in Iran Today

Nearly 30 years have passed since Iranians gathered by the tens of millions in the streets and drove their monarchy from power. Iran’s revolution reshaped the country, the region and its interaction with the rest of the world, especially the United States. The majority of those living in Iran today are too young to remember this period, and yet the Islamic Revolution remains the defining narrative for Iran’s political, social and economic development. By virtue of its size, history, resources, and strategic location, Iran under any circumstances would pose special relevance for American policy, as it did throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

However, the 1979 revolution and the political system created in its wake have placed Iran squarely at the center of America’s international challenges for the past 29 years. That revolution, and the chaos and internecine civil war that followed, enshrined the Islamic Republic, which is arguably the world’s first and only modern Muslim theocracy. It also established Iran as the epicenter of a wave of religiously-inspired activism and virulent anti-Americanism that would eventually radiate through the region and across the globe. Since that time, Iran’s society and its political dynamics have undergone an evolution nearly as dramatic and unpredictable as the revolution itself, but its leadership remains committed to two singular dimensions of the state’s legitimacy – its religious inspiration and orientation and its antagonism, even defiance, toward Washington’s role as the sole remaining superpower.

It is important to note that Iran’s political system effectively represents a fusion of theocratic and democratic institutions and ideals, in which power is bifurcated between the office of the supreme (religious) leader, who holds ultimate and ostensibly divine authority, and the legitimizing force of the popular vote, which has featured prominently in the present Iranian system of rule. This dual and dueling structure of government is a function of the contradictory demands of the broad revolutionary coalition that coalesced to topple the Shah. The constituents of this coalition shared little beyond their intense frustration with the monarchy; their interests, motivations, and visions for the post-revolutionary state diverged substantially, and in some cases placed them in direct confrontation with one another. The result was a unique framework of competing institutions with Orwellian titles that facilitated the regime’s religiously ordained repression at the same time as it nurtured the democratic aspirations of its citizenry.

It is also important to emphasize the persistence of competition within the Islamic Republic’s political elite – entrenched rivalries that in recent years have engaged Iran’s population directly at the ballot box. From the outset of the revolution and throughout the past three decades, Iran’s leadership has been riven by infighting that persisted and even intensified after each successful purge. While Iran’s dissension is frequently discounted as mere intra-elite squabbling, the regime’s fierce battles and profound philosophical differences have helped to preserve political and religious space.

These tensions have helped to generate Iran’s recent experiment in democratic reform. To the surprise of many Iranians and observers, the regime’s splintered authority and vicious power struggle generated what in retrospect must be acknowledged as a serious and authentic effort to reconcile democratic institutions and values with Iran’s self-imposed Islamic constraints. In one of Iran’s many ironies, this reform movement had its roots in the regime’s attempt to impose greater control over its fractious institutions, during the 1992 parliamentary elections. The electoral process sidelined a number of influential political actors who had opposed then-President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s economic reforms. From their refuge in universities, think tanks and semi-governmental institutions, these “Islamic leftists” began to reassess the state they had helped create and also to plot their way back into political power. Their reconsiderations coincided with the coming of age of a new generation of Iranians, as well as a potent new intellectual dynamic within Iran’s seminaries and clerical circles.

The result of these trends was the 1997 election of a moderate cleric to the presidency and an eight-year experiment in trying to reform the Islamic Republic from within, with an emphasis on reasserting the revolution’s original republican ideals through the empowerment of the state’s elected institutions. For regime conservatives, this reform movement was anathema; the central tenets of its agenda affronted their vision of an Islamic moral order and threatened to undermine the theological foundations of the state. They struck back with a vengeance through their control of key state institutions, depriving reformists of their initiatives, their popular mandate, and their key strategists and constituencies.

The 2005 presidential elections closed the door on the reform movement and signaled the opening salvo of a new era in the politics of the Islamic Republic, an era marked by the re-ascendance of the conservatives, albeit with a prominent role for a new generation. Surprisingly, the previously-unknown President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already left a dramatic imprint on Iran’s foreign and domestic policies and the national psyche. Despite the institutional impotence of his office and his limited experience on the national and international stage, Ahmadinejad has been unexpectedly central to Iran’s internal and external dilemmas. By asserting himself and inserting himself, Ahmadinejad has made himself far more relevant than most observers anticipated and has shifted the environment within Iran for civil rights and freedoms in a dramatically negative fashion. In doing so, he has benefited from the quiet but consistent support of Iran’s supreme leader, a conducive international climate, and his own formidable political skills.

Iran’s Future Political Trajectory

Examining Iran’s future must begin with one simple and unfortunate truth: for the foreseeable future, the Islamic Republic is here to stay. While there is broad-based antagonism toward the regime, there is no real opposition movement or a credible strategy for mass mobilization. Although the majority of Iranians are unequivocally disenchanted with their political leaders and system, they have demonstrated that they are not yet prepared to take that frustration to the streets. Nor has an organization or potential leader yet emerged with the discipline or the stamina to sustain a major confrontation with the forces of the government. Having endured the disappointment of their last democratic experiment gone awry, Iranians appear weary of political turmoil and, at least for the time being, resigned to some more effective evolutionary process to improve their political circumstances.

In the short term, the resurgence of Iran’s conservatives over the past five years predictably has accelerated their fragmentation; having propelled the reformists to the sidelines, Iran’s hard-liners are now fighting amongst themselves much more publicly than ever. Traditionalists are unnerved by Ahmadinejad’s radical persona and policies, and even some younger generation hardliners responsible for the president’s early rise have distanced themselves from him. Conservative splintering is beginning to have an impact at the ballot box, and December 2006 elections were widely viewed as a rebuke to Ahmadinejad and a signal that the conservative reconquest of Iran’s elective institutions would be neither eternal nor unchallenged.

For their part, Iran’s reformists are beginning to reassert themselves on the national political stage, focusing their message on Ahmadinejad’s excesses and seeking to reclaim some place within the country’s elective institutions. Their goal is to claw their way back to political relevance, assume greater influence in shaping Iranian policies, and position themselves to credibly contest the 2009 presidential elections. Given the weight of the conservative domination of the electoral system, a reformist comeback is at best an iffy proposition. And even if they were to somehow regain a foothold in the Majlis or other state institutions, it remains unclear if the reformists can advance a common positive agenda for Iran’s future beyond their critique of the current leadership.

These contending forces will play themselves out in dramatic fashion in the relatively near future, through parliamentary elections that will be held in Iran on March 14. Based on news to date from Iran, there is little reason to believe that this balloting will provide a serious opening for critics of Iran’s Islamic orthodoxy, or what any credible observer would characterize as a remotely free or fair opportunity for the Iranian people’s voice to be heard. But it would be a grave mistake to discount the significance of these elections for Iran’s future, as the Bush Administration has been wont to do during previous election seasons. The sharp contrast between Ahmadinejad and his predecessor Mohammad Khatami, both personally and in the climate that they helped cultivate internally, speaks volumes as to the salience of the electoral process in Iran for the wide range of state policies – and particularly those issues that we are here to discuss today.

Moreover, it is also clear that the intra-elite politicking that is particularly intense in Iranian electoral contests can have profound influence on the political and social environment over the long term. The consequences of the 1992 parliamentary elections were not evident to outside observers until five years later, with the emergence of the reform movement and 1997 election of Khatami. Similarly, the implications of the current divisions among Iran’s conservatives and the dynamics of the upcoming election will play themselves over the long term in ways that we simply cannot predict. At the very least, the outcome of March 14’s balloting will presage the context for the next presidential election, which is expected to take place in 2009.

Despite his manifest difficulties with both Iran’s political elites as well as its population, it would be a mistake to presume that the era of Ahmadinejad is inherently on the wane. The president benefits from the authority to stack the deck in his own favor, as well as from his patrons in the hard-line clergy, the Revolutionary Guards, and the Supreme Leader’s office. Moreover, even if Ahmadinejad somehow passes from the scene, there is every reason to believe that the legacy of his ideological fervor and the constituency whose worldview he has represented – sometimes called “neoconservatives” – will continue to shape the options available to any future Iranian leader.

Still, in any discussion of Iran’s future trajectory, it is vital to recall that those outside of Iran have not proven particularly prescient in forecasting that country’s future. Most of the abrupt changes that Iran has undergone over the past three decades – including the catalytic elections of both Khatami and Ahmadinejad – have defied the expectations and predictions of both scholars and pundits. As a result, it is worthwhile to bear in mind that the most likely path for Iran will be the one that belies all predictions.

Human Rights and Religious Freedom in Iran

Any discussion of religious freedoms in Iran must be set within the broader context for human rights and civil liberties under the current leadership. In this regard, recent trends within Iran have been particularly unfortunate. The era of Ahmadinejad has had a manifestly detrimental impact on Iran’s political and social environment. Censorship of books and other media has intensified dramatically; Islamic dress codes and other social prohibitions are being enforced with renewed vigor; and perhaps most significantly, the regime has targeted intellectual, dissidents, student activists, lawyers, union leaders, and human rights advocates for repression and imprisonment.

Emblematic of Ahmadinejad’s approach to human rights has been his appointment of two individuals to his cabinets with infamous track records on this issue. Interior Minister Mustafa Purmohammadi and Intelligence Minister Gholamhussein Mohseni Ezhei have been cited by Human Rights Watch and other organizations for their roles in several notorious episodes of human rights abuses in Iran, including the execution of political prisoners in the 1980s, the murders of dissidents and writers by Intelligence Ministry agents in the 1990s, and the prosecution of Shi’a clerics for espousing alternative theological viewpoints. Their records were so deeply and patently problematic that some members of the conservative parliament hesitated to confirm these individuals to their posts out of concern that their diplomatic travel and interactions would be limited. Equally telling – and outrageous – was the decision of the current Iranian leadership to include the despicable Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran’s prosecutor general, in its 2006 delegation to the United Nation’s Human Rights Council in Geneva. Mortazavi is well-known as the “butcher of the press” for his aggressive role in shuttering reformist publications and imprisoning journalists during the Khatami era, and is very credibly alleged to have participated directly in the 2003 interrogations of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist. Those interrogations included physical abuse and torture, which resulted in Kazemi’s death while in custody. Her abusers have never been brought to justice, and the inclusion of Mortazavi in any official Iranian activities on human rights has been appropriately described by Human Rights Watch as illustrative of the leadership’s utter contempt for the very concept and process. Like the inclusion of Mohseni Ezhei and Purmohammadi, the empowerment of Mortazavi speaks to an appalling brutality that resides in certain elements of the Iranian leadership, and that is tolerated by an even wider range of officials.

Several of the other panelists at this hearing have special expertise on the specific dimensions of Iran’s abuses toward its minority populations, and both the Department of State and the non-governmental organizations that focus on human rights issues maintain comprehensive databases of discriminatory elements of Iran’s legal framework as well as individual and generalized cases of persecution and abuse. These are the most authoritative sources on human rights and religious freedom in Iran outside of the country and its indigenous activists, and there can be no serious dissension surrounding the conclusions that they reach.

The inequities and injustices of the Islamic Republic’s treatment of minority religious groups are long established and widely acknowledged and decried. The post-revolutionary state did build in protections and guarantees for political representation designed to preserve the status of several minorities, including Zoroastrians and several primarily Christian ethnic groups, such as Armenians and Assyrians, as well as Iran’s Jewish population. This reflects both traditional Islamic tolerance toward “peoples of the book” as well as a recognition of the significant legacy that these communities retain within Iran’s storied history and inherently diverse national identity. The official space granted to sanctioned religious minorities, as well as the popular commitment to Iran’s multi-ethnic identity and the courageous leadership of these communities, has preserved their existence and even their vitality in the face of tremendous odds. Even today, in a country whose president has repeatedly engaged in Holocaust denial and incendiary rhetoric vis-à-vis Israel, Iran retains the largest Jewish community in the Middle East outside of the Jewish state, and anecdotal reports suggest that life for Iranian Jews has remained relatively unchanged under Ahmadinejad.

Nonetheless, it is clear that even members of these “protected” groups have experienced a wide variety of dilemmas since the establishment of an Islamic state. Thousands fled during the revolution and the Khomeini era, and while explicit repression of Jews, Zoroastrians and mainstream Christian denominations is at a relatively low ebb in today’s Iran, the legal framework and social context for minority religions in a state that espouses an absolutist and revolutionary Islamic order is inherently problematic and insecure.

Several other minority religious groups have not fared so well, most notably the Bahai community, which has been actively and forcefully repressed by the Islamic Republic since the revolution. As other panelists will no doubt detail, Bahais are denied their basic rights to practice their religion or even acknowledge their faith. Their educational opportunities are limited, their beliefs are routinely castigated in the official media and state sermons, and the security services have imprisoned many Bahai leaders. There is considerable anecdotal evidence that persecution of Bahais has intensified under Ahmadinejad, and this trend would certainly be consistent with the virulent ideological strand of Shia Islam associated with the president and his allies. As recently as last month, 51 Bahais were reported to have been convicted for engaging in activities counter to the Islamic system, apparently accused of engaging in proselytism.

Beyond the considerable suffering of the Bahais, it is worth drawing attention to several other communities that have been the focus of officially sanctioned repression under the Islamic Republic and in some cases whose predicament has apparently degenerated under the leadership of President Ahmadinejad. Notably, the Islamic Republic has engaged in a series of dramatic skirmishes with Sufis, a mode of Islamic observance deemed by some conservative Iranian clerics as deviationist cults. And while the large Christian denominations benefit from Constitutional protections and parliamentary representation, Iran’s leadership has reportedly imprisoned several leaders of the country’s tiny evangelical Protestant community. Finally, leaders of Iran’s Sunni populations – which comprise approximately 9 percent of the population primarily among Turkmen, Balouch, Arab and Kurdish ethnic groups, have long complained of official discrimination against their communities.

I’d like to add a few additional points related to Iran’s majority religion. The tendency in discussions on religious freedom, quite understandably, is to focus on individual and generalized cases of persecution, particularly with respect to minority denominations. But the monopolization of religion by the post-revolutionary state in Iran has also posed implications for Iran’s majority religion, most of them quite problematic. Most notably, the establishment and evolution of the office of the Supreme Leader has generated dramatic changes in the nature and structure of religious authority in Iran – and by extension, for the broader Shi’a community. As the clergy assumed a leading role in the revolutionary mobilization, they embraced a political role for the first time in Iran’s history. The transfer of religious authority to the state has entailed increasing state bureaucratization and absolutism for the state, and growing politicization for religion. As a result, Iranian politics is now imbued with the sanctity of the divine, while religion has been tainted by the expediency of political prerequisites.

Prior to the Islamic Revolution, the practice of Shia Islam in Iran was marked by considerable pluralism and diversity. Shia jurisprudence recognizes the authority of individual clerics to interpret holy law, and historically individual clerics advanced through an informal hierarchy not through a discrete selection process or a finite set of criteria, but through the recognition and assent of his peers, who at the highest levels would typically consist of fewer than 100 fellow ayatollahs and several hundred other close associates. The most widely revered clerics were considered marja-ye taqlid, or source of emulation – a model for their followers and the recipient of their religious tithing and taxation.

The Islamic Republic has effectively bureaucratized a new, and explicitly politicized, Shia hierarchy. This began under Ayatollah Khomeini, who engaged in unprecedented religious repression of other senior clerics who did not support his theory of clerical rule. It has intensified under Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose modest clerical credentials have undermined any notion of meritocratic and consensual leadership among the clergy. Khamenei’s ascension to the head of state effectively necessitated a series of Constitutional revisions that have further politicized the process and nature of clerical stature. These revisions eliminated competing offices, such as that of the Prime Minister, and invested the Supreme Leader with greater authority, including “absolute general trusteeship” over the three branches of government and an absolute mandate for the office (velayat-e faqih-ye motlaq). Ironically, the same revisions also downgraded the theological requirements for the office, meaning that as Iran’s Supreme Leader has assumed unconditional authority over the levers of state power, the position’s standing within the clerical hierarchy has waned. In other words, despite his unrivalled political authority, Khamenei is clearly outranked by other clerics – notably, a group that includes both Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq and Ayatollah Ali Hussain Montazeri, the man who was once tapped to succeed Khomeini and who is today Iran’s most prominent dissidents.

Why should any of this matter to those who care about religious freedom in Iran? The politicization of religion – even the majority religion, especially the majority religion – has a variety of negative implications for structure and practice of religion in Iran. Today, Iranian clerics ascend not by virtue of their scholarship or ability to inspire worshippers, but by virtue of a top-down network of influence and funding that privileges those who adhere to a narrow and particularist interpretation of the role of Shia Islam in government and punishes those with traditionalist or alternative views. The historic institutions of authority in Shiism are being marginalized. And the omnipresence of religious strictures also appears to have redefined young Iranians’ relationship with organized religion. A report prepared by the Tehran city council in 2000 estimated that “75 percent of the country’s 60 million inhabitants and 86 percent of young students do not say their daily prayers.” While many continue to participate in religious ceremonies and commemorations, some scholars have suggested that they do so simply because these events provide among the few officially sanctioned opportunities for mixing with strangers of the opposite sex.

Like so much within Iran’s political dynamics, even the most problematic trends provide some room for optimism. Despite the post-revolutionary state’s efforts to centralize and systematize Islam, Iran’s seminaries have in fact fostered a tremendous amount of intellectual and doctrinal ferment. One of the most interesting developments has been the articulation and exploration of dynamic jurisprudence (fiqh-e puya). Led by the diverse but convergent writings of philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush and clerics Mohammad Mojtahed-Shabestari and Mohsen Kadivar, proponents of dynamic jurisprudence argue that religious knowledge is changing, incomplete, and / or pluralistic, and the concomitant need for the clergy to incorporate man’s ever-evolving knowledge and experience in non-religious affairs. These doctrinal innovations represent an intellectual dissent against the political and theological implications of the way that power has been organized in the Islamic Republic – and each of these three thinkers – along with many others – has paid the price via prison or hard-liner harassment. While debates among seminarians can hardly be expected to generate meaningful political change on a short-term basis, Iran’s recent history demonstrates in fact that some of the most persuasive – and therefore dangerous, from the point of view of the authorities – opponents of the current political system are those who can effectively rebut the regime’s reliance on its presumptive divine mandate.

U.S. Policy

Iran ranks as America’s most durable foreign policy dilemma. Over the past 29 years, U.S. policy has focused on addressing the threat posed by Tehran. Times – and governments – have changed, but the U.S. and Iran remain squarely at odds on such critical issues as terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration has sought a comprehensive approach toward Tehran, one that deals with the multiple issues of U.S. concern, including Iran’s repression of its own citizenry. The U.S. strategy was intended to present Iranian leaders with a stark choice between moderation or isolation, and for a period Washington enjoyed unprecedented success in persuading a wide coalition of allies and international actors to support its efforts. Iran itself contributed greatly to uniting the world against it, thanks to Ahmadinejad’s truculent rhetoric and the steady expansion of Iranian influence across the region.

Despite achieving unprecedented international consensus, the latest U.S. strategy on Iran has borne little fruit. More than anything, the failure of the current U.S. approach to Iran to achieve its aims reflects the complexity and intractability of this problem, which has frustrated American officials from both sides of the political aisle for nearly 30 years. Still, in considering the Bush diplomacy on Iran and its results, there is obviously much to critique. Most of the Administration’s failings can be traced back to the spectacularly misinformed assumptions about Iran and the region that senior American officials nurtured even in the face of contradictory evidence – the presumption that the Islamic Republic was on the verge of collapse; that intensifying concerns about Iran would fundamentally alter the strategic calculus of the leading Arab states; and that a belated effort to engage Tehran could succeed while maintaining the posture and rhetoric of regime change. These misapprehensions are the product of an incredibly limited knowledge base within the U.S. government about Iran, as well as the antipathy of the Bush Administration to questioning its own ideological verities.

At the same time, the Administration also deserves some credit in specific areas – for engaging in the thankless, dogged toil of building and sustaining a surprisingly robust international coalition on Iran; for endeavoring to reverse certain elements of its policy when it was clear; for crafting a serious diplomatic overture to Iran on its nuclear program. To its credit, the Administration also recognized that the American diplomatic apparatus for dealing with Iran was insufficient and dysfunctional, and established a new set of administrative structures to coordinate all official policy and activities with respect to Iran. In addition, the Administration notably placed a priority on reenergizing people-to-people diplomacy, a particularly constructive role.

Beyond these limited achievements, though, any U.S. administration will face an enormous challenge in trying to devise an effective approach to Iran. Washington should begin with the caveat that panaceas have no place in managing U.S. policy toward Tehran. Both Americans and Iranians occasionally indulge of fantasies that some ‘grand bargain’ can be achieved that will holistically settle all of the outstanding issues between the two governments. Unfortunately, however, history demonstrates that the depth of the grievances and the complexity of the political contexts on both sides obstructs even the slightest positive movement. Short of a wholesale political transformation in Tehran, however, there is no magic formula for settling this rift.

We may not be in a position to draft a comprehensive settlement, or even a credible road map. However, we can identify a series of general principles that should frame our strategy if we are to be successful. First, and most importantly, a successful American approach to Iran must acknowledge that diplomacy is the only alternative available to U.S. policymakers. We simply do not have a viable military option available to us that would generate a better outcome for our interests across the Middle East. Any resort to force would do little to eliminate the ultimate sources of our concerns, and even these limited benefits would be overwhelmingly offset by a wide range of negative consequences.

The second principle that should anchor any new approach to Iran is an abiding commitment to engagement as one of the indispensable instruments of American statecraft. As Iran’s politics have shifted in a more radical right-wing direction, the appeal of engagement has diminished even to those who advocated it during the brief advent of a reformist president and parliament during the late 1990s. However, the best argument for engaging with Iran was never predicated on the relative palatability of our potential interlocutors, but on the seriousness of the differences between our governments and the centrality of the U.S. interests at stake. The international reprobation aimed at Ahmadinejad and his clique is well earned, and yet it is ultimately an insufficient excuse for constraining our own tools for dealing with Tehran. It is both appropriate and potentially effective to engage with Iran even when it is led by individuals whose views and policies we revile.

The aim of diplomacy is to advance interests, not to make friends or endorse enemies. Engagement with Iran is not an automatic path to rapprochement, nor should it imply a unilateral offer of a ‘grand bargain.’ Rather it would entail a return to the long-held position that we are prepared to talk with Iranian leaders, in a serious and sustained way, in any authoritative dialogue as a means of addressing the profound concerns that its policies pose for U.S interests and allies. A commitment to engagement with Iran should also incorporate the designation of an authorized and empowered negotiator, and the outlining of a diplomatic process for making progress on the discrete but complex array of issues at stake.

Engaging with Iran will not be easy, nor will it provide immediate payoffs. Even during the heyday of the reform movement, Washington found little success in persuading Iran to engage in a direct and ongoing dialogue. Tehran ignored the quiet overtures of the Clinton Administration and publicly disparaged the very U.S. gestures that were intended to show goodwill. For the many justified critics of the current Administration’s approach to Iran, President Clinton’s experience should serve as a reminder of the intricacy and unpredictability of finding an Iranian interlocutor. Still, these failures – along with the stillbirth of the Bush Administration’s belated offer to negotiate on Iran’s nuclear program – should not discredit diplomacy as a tool for dealing with Tehran. In fact, the highly successful bilateral negotiations and cooperation over Afghanistan in the months following September 11th should prove instructive about the potential payoffs of a serious effort to engage Iran.

Engaging with the Iranian regime does not imply forsaking our vocal commitment to criticizing Tehran’s abuses of its citizens’ rights. We can and should speak out in favor of greater social, political, and economic liberalization in Iran, and we should press vigorously against the regime’s repression – greatly increased in recent months – of dissidents, activists and students. Iranian dissidents have repeatedly and vocally testified to the inverse relationship between U.S.-Iranian tensions and the climate for human rights and democracy within the country. We do no disservice to Iran’s courageous advocates of a better future for their own people by dealing directly with their leadership, no matter how distasteful.

Finally, any serious effort to promote human rights and religious freedom in Iran must drive a stake through the heart of the myth of externally-orchestrated regime change. This is no small task – there is much to suggest that the Islamic Republic is vulnerable, and the illusion of an imminent revolution has tempted U.S. administrations and pundits repeatedly over the past three decades. For the Bush Administration, indulging in the misapprehension produced several years of diplomatic inaction and a stream of fruitless and counter-productive public messaging, and eventually tainted even its belated but genuine efforts to initiate dialogue with Tehran. Secretary Rice was forced to resort to a grudging public acknowledgement that the Administration was not seeking regime change, but it was too little and too late to alter the strategic calculus of a regime whose leadership viewed the U.S. as irrevocably opposed to its existence.

Abandoning the ‘regime change’ fantasy means disbanding or significantly retooling our democracy promotion programming for Iran. After a thirty-year absence and with the only the most hazy sense of the day-to-day dynamics of the Islamic Republic’s politics and society, Washington is unlikely to succeed in attempting to conjure up an opposition or orchestrate political mobilization from a distance. Failure, however, is hardly the worst-case outcome here; the publicity surrounding our democracy program has already helped spark a revived crackdown on Iranian dissidents and activists, and has constrained and undermined the very civil society we hope to support. Even among the most ardent opponents of the Islamic regime, accepting support from an external government remains highly taboo, and the notion of American meddling in Iran’s internal affairs represents the third rail of Iranian politics, a legacy of the infamous U.S. role in the 1953 coup that unseated Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadiq.

The country’s most prominent dissidents – from Akbar Ganji to Shirin Ebadi to Emad Baqi and many others – have repeatedly condemned the U.S. funding. As a result of this renunciation as well as the formidable logistical obstacles to funneling support to Iranian oppositionists, it remains unclear how much – if any – of the millions already appropriated for the Iran democracy program will ever reach Iranians. In lieu of our high-profile, low-impact democracy program, we should dramatically expand opportunities for Iranians to interact with the rest of the world through exchange programs, scholarships and enhanced access to visas.

We must recognize that the ideal opportunity for dealing with Tehran will never come; the objective of American policy must be to create the grounds for progress with Iran even if the Iranian internal environment remains hostile or the regional context continues to present challenges. The Bush Administration first embraced a chimerical notion of the regime’s vulnerability, and later boxed itself into a corner by insisting that nothing could be achieved so long as the Iranians perceived momentum to be on their side. Secretary Rice brushed off Congressional queries about dialogue with Iran over Iraq in January 2007, saying that approaching Tehran while neighboring Iraq was still in turmoil would be counterproductive.

Timing matters in negotiations, and the concern about the impact of regional dynamics is justifiable, but to avoid diplomatic interface because of a perceived power imbalance is effectively to consign the countries to permanent antagonism. Our interest in addressing the challenges posed by Iran cannot be deferred until we have achieved the most conducive regional balance of power, or until Iran has finally elected the most amenable array of leaders.

Iran: Reality, Options, and Consequences

Iran, Middle East, Middle East Democracy and Development, Diplomacy
Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Saban Center for Middle East Policy
House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee
NOVEMBER 07, 2007 —

Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today about U.S. diplomacy toward Iran. It is a privilege to participate in a serious discussion of this vital and complex issue, and the Committee is performing an important service by convening this ongoing series of conversations about the political dynamics in Iran today, U.S. policy options, and the possible ramifications.
RELATED CONTENT
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
Advancing Religious Freedom and Human Rights in Iran
Suzanne Maloney, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, February 21, 2008
RESEARCH AND COMMENTARY
Fear and Loathing in Tehran
Suzanne Maloney, The National Interest, September-October 2007
BOOK
Ayatollah Gorbachev
Suzanne Maloney, December 01, 2003
More Related Content »
Today Iran is a front-and-center political issue and ranks among the top concerns of U.S. policymakers. Unfortunately, however, the debate over Iran policy has involved a great deal of heat and very little light. There is no shortage of tough talk on Tehran in Washington, from both the Administration as well as its critics. But given how little we know about Iran, and given the almost inevitably reactive nature of U.S. policy on this issue, there has been too little informed analysis and reasoned discussion underlying either American rhetoric or actions. For this reason, the Committee’s broad scope and the timing of this discussion should prove particularly valuable.
I hope to offer some background on where and why we may have missed prior windows of opportunity for advancing a diplomatic solution to the Iranian challenge, and provide some thoughts on constructing an approach to our pressing concerns on Iran that might, over time, produce some real results.

Opportunity Lost

Since 2005, the Administration has sought to devise a comprehensive approach toward Tehran to deal with the multiple issues of U.S. concern, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its bankrolling of terrorism, its bid to assert itself as a regional hegemon, and its repression of its own citizenry. The U.S. strategy was intended to present Iranian leaders with a stark choice between moderation or isolation, and for a period Washington enjoyed unprecedented success in persuading a wide coalition of allies and international actors to support its efforts. Iran itself contributed greatly to uniting the world against it, with the provocative rhetoric and policies associated with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad since his 2005 election.

Despite achieving unprecedented international consensus, the latest U.S. strategy on Iran has borne little fruit. Iran spurned an incentives package that included an offer of direct negotiations with Washington, put forward in 2006 in exchange for Iran’s agreement to relinquish the uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that could enable it to produce material for a nuclear bomb. Tehran has flouted subsequent similar demands from the United Nations Security Council, and its challenge to American interests across the region has only intensified, particularly in Iraq where the U.S. military has blamed Iran for the supplying munitions that have killed American soldiers.

More than anything, the failure of the current U.S. approach to Iran to achieve its aims reflects the complexity and intractability of this problem, which has frustrated American officials from both sides of the political aisle for nearly 30 years. However, the failure is also the product of several years of disastrous diplomacy toward Iran and the broader Middle East, informed by a set of mistaken assumptions, by the Bush Administration. Understanding where we have miscalculated – and more importantly why – is important to ensuring that we avoid repeating or perpetuating flawed policies. As discussed in detail below, chief among the issues that has frustrated the U.S. strategy is its inherent inconsistency. The Administration’s efforts on Iran have been sabotaged by the impossibility of balancing its belated interest in negotiating with Tehran with a fundamental rejection of the Iranian regime’s legitimacy. The bottom line is that no regime is likely to bargain away its ultimate deterrent capability so long as it perceives the ultimate objective is its own eradication.

In reviewing the missed opportunities, however, we also need to be careful to avoid a narrative that places responsibility for the perpetuation of the estrangement and the intensification of the Iranian challenge solely on the misjudgments of this Administration or the U.S. alone. Engagement can be a powerful tool for dealing with Iran, but there is simply no that Iranian leaders have ever been prepared, fully and authoritatively, to make epic concessions on the key areas of U.S. concern. Any prospects of such a deal moving forward were always incredibly limited, as much because of ideological and bureaucratic constraints on the Iranian side as our own.

It is also important to counter any implication that U.S. policy bears responsibility for the unfortunate trends that have overtaken Iranian policy over the past several years. We could not have saved the reform movement from its slow-moving ejection from the frontlines of Iranian politics – Iranian hardliners deserve full credit for that, along with a series of miscalculations by the reformists themselves. Nor is it likely that any American policy truly can transform the dynamics of political life in Iran today. Ultimately, given our troubled historical relationship and our limited constructive leverage today, the U.S. tends to have only the most limited capacity to advance the cause of moderation within Iran, and a powerful if inadvertent capacity for helping out the hardliners.

Nonetheless, with the wisdom of hindsight, it is clear that the Bush Administration’s miscalculations – based in part on a wholesale misreading of Iran's internal political dynamics – by the Bush Administration forfeited perhaps the best opportunity in recent history to generate real momentum for solving at least some of our problems with Iran. Those miscalculations continue to shape and ultimately undermine American diplomacy on Iran today.

The primary American miscalculation stemmed from the conviction that the Iranian regime is on the verge of collapse or revolutionary upheaval. This presumption, while deeply flawed, was understandably tempting. Superficially, Iran demonstrates all the risk factors for a revolutionary break: a disproportionately young population; restive ethnic minority populations; a distorted, inefficient economy; and a regime mired in an obsolescent ideology, riven by factional feuds, and reliant on repression to maintain its hold on power.

But the reality is that the Iranian regime has survived everything short of the plague: war, isolation, instability, terrorist attacks, leadership transition, drought, and earthquakes. This does not imply that the regime is impregnable, nor that its leaders view it as such. Rather the endurance of the Islamic Republic through multiple crises is a testament to the adaptive capacity of the system and its leaders, and the lack of any alternative power center. Rampant popular dissatisfaction has never evolved into an organized opposition, and there remains no coherent challenge to the Iranian system.

None of this was apparent to the Bush Administration, however, for whom Iran – like its neighbor – was terra incognito and for that reason the object of enduring irrational fantasies. After an initial muddle, the Bush Administration began framing its policy around the fallacy of the regime’s anticipated demise, first with the inclusion of Iran as a member of the “axis of evil” in the President’s January 2002 State of the Union address. This message was reinforced through a statement issued by the White House in July 2002 marking the anniversary of student demonstrations that had rocked Iran three years earlier. The statement lamented the fact that Iranians’ “voices are not being listened to by the unelected people who are the real rulers” and promising that “(a)s Iran’s people move towards a future defined by greater freedom, they will have no better friend” than Washington.

The Administration used this episode to signal its rejection of the faltering reform movement and its shift toward a strategy focused on galvanizing popular opposition to the regime as a whole. This across-the board repudiation of Iran’s ruling elites and the conscious embrace of the generic ‘Iranian people’ has shaped Bush Administration policy toward Iran for the past five years. In particular, this determination informed the Administration’s decision in 2003 to cut off its quiet dialogue with Tehran and eschew any further contacts, a move that contradicted prior U.S. policy and mirrored Iran’s own ideologically-imposed constraints on its dealings with Washington. At the same time, the U.S. effectively dismissed a back-channel overture from mid-ranking Iranian officials to explore the possibilities for a ‘grand bargain’ between the two governments.

In tandem with the refusal to engage with the regime, Washington began seeking new means to expedite political change inside the country. The Administration’s early efforts were mostly comic fumbling, including the Pentagon’s public flirtation with a reviled opposition group on the U.S. terrorist list and the renewal of contacts with a discredited figure from the Iran-contra episode. Having used the White House bully pulpit to reach out to the Iranian people to little effect, the Administration – supported and even pushed on this issue by many within the Congress – chose to embrace a high-profile effort to identify, cultivate and fund opponents of the regime. The centerpiece of this policy was the February 2006 announcement of a $75 million fund to promote democracy in Iran, an initiative that, in light of the history of American-Iranian relations, was destined to be interpreted by Tehran as an explicit endorsement of regime change.

The purported ‘grand bargain’ offer in 2003 has generated a considerable amount of media and political interest. The prevailing interpretation suggests that ideological obstinacy within neoconservative corners of the Bush Administration was the primary factor in the decision not to pursue this potential trial balloon. In fact, from my inherently limited knowledge of this episode, a variety of factors were at play, including the somewhat problematic involvement of the Swiss ambassador and the lack of compelling evidence of that the overture had been endorsed by senior Iranian officials. Should the Administration have tested this overture and explored the possibility – small but nonetheless real – that it represented the consensus position of the Iranian leadership? Absolutely. And while it is by no means certain that the overture itself would have inevitably produced a viable path forward toward a full resolution of the issues between the two countries, it is absolutely clear that engagement with those Iranians who were interested in bridging our differences would have proven a major asset.

Examining this critical moment in U.S. policy toward Iran and the region, however, suggests that the more momentous American misstep was the decision to suspend ‘Geneva channel’ dialogue with Tehran. The stated rationale for this decision was the bombing of a Riyadh housing compound for expatriates that the U.S. attributed to Al Qaeda operatives who had sought refuge in Iran. Unstated but obvious, however, was the impact of the early successes of the U.S. military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq on the Administration’s ambitions and decision-making toward Iran. Its proponents saw Iraq’s liberation as the death knell for its neighboring regime. They scorned the utility as well as the morality of dealing with Tehran on the eve of its presumptive collapse, and events inside Iran, such as the serious student unrest that erupted in June 2003, appeared to confirm their expectations. In the aftermath of Saddam’s defeat, any contact with official Iran was viewed as tantamount to ‘legitimizing’ the Iranian regime – and thus taboo for Washington.

Unlike the ‘grand bargain’ offer, the Geneva track had the advantage of tangible evidence of Iranian commitment at the highest level, as demonstrated by the specific assistance provided by Tehran in some of the logistical backdrop of Operation Enduring Freedom as well as the establishment of the Karzai government in Kabul. These talks were unprecedented and important on two distinct levels: one, they entailed the first sustained, officially sanctioned process of dialogue between Iranian and American officials since the revolution; and two, they produced concrete, constructive results that benefited both parties, as well as the people of Afghanistan. Had this path been pursued, it would have offered the best prospect for moving toward a less contentious relationship between Washington and Tehran and the most effective means of mitigating the elements of Iranian policy that concern us most today, particularly its involvement with terrorism. Specifically, had we continued and strengthened this dialogue and the on-the-ground cooperation in Afghanistan, we might have precluded Iran’s current efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, progress that would have enabled us to address Iran’s nuclear program at a time when its leadership was prepared to suspend enrichment activities.

The decision to curtail any direct contact with the Iranian government cemented a new red line in U.S. politics – the blanket refusal to engage across the board on any issue with Tehran. This represents a critical repudiation of all prior U.S. policy, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, which had been consistently predicated on a readiness to talk to Tehran on issues of mutual concern so long as the dialogue was clearly authorized. The Bush Administration’s decision to tie the hands of American diplomacy imposed unprecedented constraints on our leverage vis-à-vis Iran.

The categorical rejection of talking to Tehran remained firmly in place from May 2003 until the May 2006 American offer to join direct negotiations with Tehran on the nuclear issue. Just as the consequences of the 2003 decision to suspend the Geneva Track are too little appreciated by the Administration, the significance of the May 2006 proposal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been dismissed too quickly by the Administration’s critics. This was a serious, sincere offer, one that finally married the U.S. position on Iran’s nuclear program with that of the international community and one that put forward a remarkable American concession – the end of U.S. opposition to a civil nuclear program. The insistence on the suspension of enrichment as a precondition for beginning the dialogue was not, as some conspiracy theorists have alleged, a deliberate American effort to sabotage any diplomatic process and ensure a steady path toward military action but rather a simple repetition of the existing stipulations articulated by both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the EU-3.

Despite the dramatic reversal that it represented, the P5+1 offer was significantly undercut by the Bush Administration’s track record on Iran as well as its internal contradictions, particularly the continuing internal reluctance to deal with a regime that American officials find distasteful. As a result, even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice launched the 2006 offer for nuclear negotiations, she adamantly rejected any prospect of broader engagement with Tehran. Indeed while the incentives package itself appeared to presuppose a broad discussion of outstanding grievances, Rice and other officials insisted that any dialogue with Tehran would be narrowly constrained to the nuclear question itself. Moreover, in the effort to gain internal consensus on reversing American refusal to talk to Tehran, the Administration remained very much hamstrung by its essential aversion to dialogue with the Iranian regime. This context helped shape the absurd U.S. reluctance to schedule discussions with Iran over the deteriorating situation in Iraq – despite the fact that the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad had standing authorization to engage with his counterpart. In fact, after an orchestrated campaign by the most senior Iranian officials pressing for direct dialogue on issues related to Iraq in March 2006, the Administration reacted dismissively, and 14 months passed before talks took place. Unsurprisingly, with intensified tensions between the two countries and even greater chaos in Iraq by this time, the Baghdad dialogue produced little beyond mutual recriminations.

Beyond the internal contradictions that have undermined American diplomacy toward Iran, U.S. policy is greatly complicated by the limitations on our understanding of the country, as Secretary Rice herself has acknowledged. Asked in June 2006 about Iran’s pattern of defying both logic and American expectations, Rice conceded that the Islamic Republic is “a political system I don’t understand very well,” adding that “one of the downsides of not having been in Iran in – for 27 years as a government is that we don’t really have people who know Iran inside our own system…We’re also operating from something of a disadvantage in that we don’t really have very good veracity or a feel for the place.”

The absence of normal diplomatic contacts is a far greater impediment to policymaking than is generally understood or acknowledged. Without eyes and ears on the ground, the U.S. Government across the board is deprived of the basic understanding that normal interactions of an Embassy and its staff provide: the sense of political dynamics; the historical knowledge; the routine business that provides irreplaceable insights. After a three-decade absence, the U.S. government is singularly uninformed about the country’s political culture and day-to-day dynamics.

This lack of understanding of Iran has played out directly on our strategy. There is a great deal of talk among American officials, particularly since Ahmadinejad’s ascendance, about splintering the regime, but we know so little about the shape and nature of power in Iran today that State Department officials were forced to rely on a Google search to identify potential subjects for United Nations sanctions in 2006. The belief that we can leverage whatever differences exist within the regime seems rather far-fetched given our inability to even anticipate the rise of the reform movement or the ascension of a new generation of hard-liners as epitomized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Presence does not always imply prescience, as the failure of Washington to anticipate the revolution itself might suggest, but American capacity to undertake effective policy toward Tehran must recognize the severe restrictions under which we operate.

A Diplomatic Path Forward

It would be tempting to devote the bulk of this discussion to past mistakes; after all, retrospective history is much easier, in part because our miscalculations in Iraq and across the region more broadly have bequeathed a far more complex and challenging strategic context. Ultimately, however, the real purpose of any discussion of the past must be to shape an approach that offers a better prospect for addressing our most serious concerns about Iranian policies. The context for improvement is incredibly challenging: both countries are already engaged in long political campaigns that may not be conducive to a serious consideration of realistic policy options. Moreover, Iran’s nuclear program is advancing at a frenetic pace and Iraq and Afghanistan have become key flashpoints not simply between American and Iranian interests but directly between their military forces as well. There is no simple formula for mitigating the challenge that Iran poses to U.S. interests, reducing tensions, or ending the estrangement between the two capitals. However, there are a series of general principles that should frame our strategy if we are to be successful.

First, and most importantly, a successful American approach to Iran must acknowledge that diplomacy is the only alternative available to U.S. policymakers. We simply do not have a viable military option available to us that would generate a better outcome for our interests across the Middle East. Any resort to force to address our concerns about Iran’s nuclear program or its involvement in terrorism would significantly harm all of our primary objectives in the region. Iranian leaders learned from Iraq’s Osirak experience, and as a result their nuclear installations are hardened, dispersed, and located near population centers. Moreover, given the failures of American intelligence in Iraq, there is little reason for confidence that any American strike would conclusively incapacitate Iran’s nuclear program.

Whatever limited benefits in terms of delaying Iran’s capacity to cross the nuclear threshold would be overwhelmingly offset by a wide range of negative consequences. A strike would galvanize Iran’s profoundly nationalistic population, and thoroughly consolidate public support for their unpopular government. The regime’s retaliatory reach would be felt throughout the region, particularly by American allies, and the aftermath would almost surely doom any prospects for revitalizing the peace process or wresting a stable outcome from Iraq. The sole beneficiaries from a military conflict between Washington and Tehran would be the forces of radical anti-Americanism throughout the Islamic world.

It has become axiomatic among U.S. officials and politicians that the military option does and should remain on the table for dealing with Tehran. This conventional wisdom warrants questioning. It is not clear that such vague warnings carry significant credibility in Tehran given the logistical and policy constraints that stem from our involvements elsewhere in the region. Moreover, embellished by references to “World War Three” and “nuclear holocaust” by senior U.S. officials, such rhetoric serves only to strengthen Iranian hard-liners and reinforce the most paranoid fears of a leadership already steeped in suspicion of American motives and objectives.

Second, diplomatic engagement is an appropriate and potentially effective tool for addressing our deep differences with Tehran. As Iran’s politics have shifted in a more radical right-wing direction, the appeal of engagement might seem to have diminished even to those who advocated it during the brief advent of a reformist president and parliament during the late 1990s. However, the best argument for engaging with Iran was never predicated on the relative palatability of our potential interlocutors, but on the seriousness of the differences between our governments and the centrality of the U.S. interests at stake. The international reprobation aimed at Ahmadinejad and his clique is well earned, and yet it is ultimately an insufficient excuse for constraining our own tools for dealing with Tehran.

The aim of diplomacy is to advance interests, not to make friends or endorse enemies. A serious diplomatic approach to Iran would recognize that Washington’s May 2006 offer to negotiate on the nuclear program misfired, but would not continue to hold American interests hostage to the conditions of that particular proposal, specifically the requirement that Iran suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities. Through the UN Security Council and its existing and potentially future sanctions, the international community has a vehicle to impress its objections to Iran’s nuclear ambitions on its leadership.

Engagement with Iran is not an automatic path to rapprochement, nor should it imply a unilateral offer of a ‘grand bargain.’ Rather it would entail a return to the long-held position that we are prepared to talk with Iranian leaders, in a serious and sustained way, in any authoritative dialogue as a means of addressing the profound concerns that its policies pose for U.S interests and allies. A commitment to engagement with Iran should also incorporate the designation of an authorized and empowered negotiator, and outline a diplomatic process for making progress on the discrete but complex array of issues at stake. One possible mechanism worth pursuing derives from a 2004 Council on Foreign Relations Task Force chaired by former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, serving at the time as president of Texas A&M University. The Task Force recommended outlining a basic statement of principles, along the lines of the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué signed by the United States and China, to provide the parameters for U.S.-Iranian engagement and establish the overarching objectives for dialogue.

It is equally important to note that in the absence of any purposeful commitment to engaging with Iran, the Bush Administration’s overreliance on sticks has inevitably proven ineffective as a means of altering Iran’s behavior. Incremental international pressure, particularly while the costs are generally bearable, is more likely to consolidate the regime than splinter it, and Iran is more likely to escalate than concede when backed into a corner. Ultimately, the failure of the Administration’s diplomatic initiative should not discredit diplomacy as a tool for dealing with Tehran. In fact, it is the Administration’s early experience with the Geneva Track dialogue with Tehran that should prove instructive about the potential payoffs of a serious effort to engage Iran.

Engaging with the Iranian regime does not imply forsaking our vocal commitment to criticizing Tehran’s abuses of its citizens’ rights. We can and should speak out in favor of greater social, political, and economic liberalization in Iran, and we should press vigorously against the regime’s repression – greatly increased in recent months – of dissidents, activists and students. In lieu of our high-profile, low-impact democracy program, we should dramatically expand opportunities for Iranians to interact with the rest of the world through exchange programs, scholarships and enhanced access to visas.

Third, modest pressure is unlikely to produce dramatic changes in Iranian policy or its leadership’s strategic calculus. Despite the prevailing perceptions and its leadership’s relentless sloganeering, Iran and its policies are not immutable. Since the revolution, Iran has evolved dramatically, in part as a result of its young population and the ongoing generational shift in leadership. And the regime’s policies have been forced to change as well, as evidenced on a number of domestic issues as well as its international approach. This evolution continues even as the domestic environment has regressed, for example with the unprecedented 2006 endorsement by Iran’s supreme leader of dialogue with Washington – a position that only a few years before risked a prison term when voiced by dissidents.

However, we need to be clear about the conditions under which comprehensive reversals on key positions, such as the nuclear issue, are likely to occur. Financial sanctions, particularly the banking restrictions and moral suasion toward third-country institutions that has prompted many to retrench or eliminate their dealings with Iran, are much in vogue these days. It is incontrovertible that the increasing impediments to any interaction between Iran and the dollar-based international financial system as a result of these measures has posed considerable costs and inconvenience for Tehran. Ultimately, however, as long as Iran continues to export oil, the government will be cushioned by vast financial reserves – somewhere in the range of $70 billion for the current year alone. The U.S. can make it more costly for Iran to do business, but short of multilateral sanctions that target Iran’s oil exports – unlikely at the current price or political environment – Iran will continue to do business.

Moreover, the expectation that we can splinter the regime through economic pressures may be overstated or even wholly inaccurate. Tehran appears to have correctly calculated that the regime can withstand the costs of whatever modest economic penalties the international community can agree upon. Ironically, internal dissatisfaction within Iran today derives not from financial restrictions or the economic cost to the regime or the people of Iranian foreign policy, but rather from the profusion of revenues, and the resulting reckless spending and other disastrous economic policies launched by Ahmadinejad.

Fourth, a broad international coalition is the best vehicle for exerting external influence on Iran. Mobilizing the international community to deal with Iran presents Washington with a perennial dilemma of bridging the disparities between the interests and approach of American allies and partners. International consensus on Iran is broad, but ultimately not terribly deep; while there is a shared aversion to an Iranian nuclear capability, there is much greater disparity about the urgency of the threat. In seeking to apply the most robust penalties to Tehran for its noncompliance with IAEA and UN mandates, Washington has struggled to maintain consensus, with Germany, Russia and China proving particularly reluctant. That struggle appears to have been compounded by recent unilateral American steps, including the decision to levy new sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its subsidiary Quds Force that will complicate Russia and China’s political and commercial relations with Iran.

The Administration’s aversion to “lowest common denominator” steps is understandable, but it also is misguided. Iran has withstood various degrees of unilateral measures from Washington since 1979, and while it has undoubtedly hampered the economy, the regime has survived and even strengthened its hold on power as a result of these constraints. In a competitive international marketplace, measures imposed by a narrow “coalition of the willing” – even one that includes traditional Iranian trade partners such as the U.K., France and Japan – only create new opportunities for new players on the Iranian economic scene, particularly those from Russia and China. Conversely, the Administration’s success in gaining near unanimous support with the IAEA and UN for more strenuous pressure on Tehran represented the first time in its history that the Islamic Republic has faced sustained pressure from such a broad-based array of international capitals. Most Iranian leaders – with the possible exception of Ahmadinejad and his relatively narrow power base – are disinclined to see the country return to the autarkic conditions of the 1980s, and the Iranian population resents any prospect of its creeping return to isolation. An expansive international coalition may prove unwieldy to work with, but its existence sends a stronger signal to Tehran than any set of partially-subscribed sanctions.

Fifth, containment is a viable alternative strategy, if ultimately second-best. In the absence of better diplomatic or military options, Washington can and should revert to containment, the old stand-by of American policy toward Tehran. It is undoubtedly a second-best approach, relative to the prospect of some dramatic initiative that would provide a conclusive resolution of the Iranian challenge; however, containment promises the considerable virtue of being an achievable aim of U.S. policy. By rebalancing U.S. security relationships with the Persian Gulf states, and prioritizing some sustainable posture leading to an exit strategy from Iraq, Washington can check Iran’s capacity for regional trouble-making and begin to shift the burden of any future sectarian instability onto Tehran. Effective containment of Iran must begin in the Persian Gulf, not with the sort of massive arms package put forward by the Administration in response to regional uncertainty, but rather through cooperation with the Gulf states in shaping a framework for long-term regional security. This effort should incorporate a credible vision for America’s inevitably downsized role in Iraq as a means of restoring some confidence among our regional allies.
Containment also offers the advantage of creating space over the longer term for a more nimble diplomacy to have some impact. Patience can be a policy virtue, both in terms of achieving broad international consensus and dealing with an unpredictable leadership. Iranian politics remain in a near-constant state of flux, and in the lead-up to March 2008 parliamentary elections and presidential balloting the following year, Tehran appears poised to shift toward the center in a potentially decisive fashion. Moreover, in spite of the prevailing recalcitrance of the Ahmadinejad era, it has also produced for the first time in Iran’s post-revolutionary history public commitments by the entire spectrum of the Iranian leadership in favor of dialogue with Washington.

As Washington also looks toward a new political era, the prospect for building new avenues of cooperation with Tehran in a post-Iraq future should not be discounted. The prospective choice for the international community, as articulated recently by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, between an Iranian bomb and bombing Iran is ultimately a false one. Such rhetoric only obscures the true dimensions of this critical dilemma, and narrows our options unnecessarily. The real challenge for Washington and its allies will be to devise a strategy that maximizes multilateral diplomatic leverage for negotiating with Tehran, while restoring confidence in the capacity of the U.S. and its allies to manage Iranian regional ambitions and impact.