[Mb-civic] It's the Regime, Stupid - Robert Kagan - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

It's the Regime, Stupid

By Robert Kagan
Sunday, January 29, 2006; B07

If an air and missile strike could destroy Iran's nuclear weapons 
program, it might seem the best of many bad options. But the likely 
costs outweigh the benefits.

Is the intelligence on Iran so much better than it was on Iraq? The 
Clinton administration launched Operation Desert Fox against Iraq in 
1998 to degrade its weapons programs, and even today we don't know what 
it achieved. As President Clinton later put it, "We might have gotten it 
all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. 
But we didn't know."

Would Desert Fox II in Iran, even on a larger scale, produce a very 
different result? The Pentagon can hit facilities it can see with 
relative confidence. But much of Iran's program is underground, and some 
of it we don't know about. Even if a strike set back Iran's plans, we 
would not know by how much. For all the price we would pay, we wouldn't 
even know what we'd achieved.

And we would pay a price. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs 
would declare victory, as Saddam Hussein did in 1998, and probably would 
gain some sympathy and admiration from the Muslim world and beyond. 
Instead of pushing for sanctions against Iran at the U.N. Security 
Council, the administration might be fending off resolutions censuring 
it for "aggression."

Then there is the prospect of Iranian retaliation: terrorist attacks, 
military activity in Iraq, attempts to close off the Persian Gulf 
shipping lanes and disrupt oil supplies. Unless we were prepared to 
escalate, ultimately to the point of taking down the regime, we could 
end up in worse shape than when we began.

But the inadequacy of the military strike option does not mean we can 
simply turn to diplomacy. Diplomacy by itself has no better chance of 
success. The present Iranian regime appears committed to acquiring a 
nuclear weapon. It has been undeterred by the prospect of international 
isolation or economic sanctions and apparently deems these hardships an 
acceptable cost. If so, even bigger carrots will not persuade it to 
forgo a program it considers vital to its interests. Fear of U.S. 
military action is probably the only reason Iran even pretended to 
negotiate with the Europeans (and a big reason why the Europeans have 
negotiated with Iran), but it has not been enough to stop their program.

We need to reorient our strategy. Our justifiable fixation on preventing 
Iran from getting the bomb has somehow kept us from pursuing a more 
fundamental and more essential goal: political change in Iran. We need 
to start supporting liberal and democratic change for an Iranian 
population that we know seeks both.

No one wants to see Iran get a bomb, but it does matter who is in power. 
We don't worry that France or Great Britain has nuclear weapons. We 
tolerate India's and Israel's arsenals largely because we have some 
faith that their democratic governments will not use them. Were Iran 
ruled by even an imperfect democratic government, we would be much less 
concerned about its weaponry. It might dismantle its program 
voluntarily, as did Ukraine and South Africa. But even if it didn't, a 
liberal and democratic Iran would be less paranoid about its security 
and therefore less reliant on nuclear weapons to defend itself.

The Bush administration, despite its doctrine of democratization, has 
not yet tried to apply it in the one place where ideals and strategic 
interest most clearly intersect. It has done little to push for 
political change or to exploit the evident weaknesses in the mullahs' 
regime. The steps are obvious: Communicate directly to Iran's very 
westernized population, through radio, the Internet and other media; 
organize international support for unions and human rights and other 
civic groups, as well as religious groups that oppose the regime; 
provide covert support to those willing to use it; and impose sanctions, 
not so much to stop the nuclear program -- since they probably won't -- 
but to squeeze the business elite that supports the regime.

Some worry about sparking another Hungarian-style uprising or Tiananmen 
Square massacre. True, the mullahs might quash dissident movements we 
support, just as they have quashed dissident movements we did not 
support. But the Iranian people would not be worse off than they are 
now, and if some want to risk their lives for freedom, who are we to 
tell them they shouldn't?

This doesn't mean giving up on diplomacy. A strategy aimed at changing 
the Iranian regime is entirely compatible with ongoing diplomatic 
efforts to slow Iran's weapons programs. It might even aid diplomacy, 
since Iran's leaders fear internal unrest more than external pressure. 
In the 1970s and '80s, the West pursued arms control while it supported 
dissidents and liberalization in the Soviet bloc. The one did not 
preclude the other.

But we shouldn't delude ourselves. Efforts to foment political change 
won't necessarily bear fruit in time to prevent Iran from acquiring a 
bomb. That may be the risk we have to take. But if this or the next 
administration decides it is too dangerous to wait for political change, 
then the answer will have to be an invasion, not merely an air and 
missile strike, to put an end to Iran's nuclear program as well as to 
its regime. If Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon is truly 
intolerable, that is the only military answer.

The nonmilitary answer in Iran is political change. That is where we 
should now be directing our energy, our diplomacy, our intelligence and 
our substantial economic resources. Yes, time is growing short, and 
partly because so many years have already been squandered. But better to 
start now than to squander more.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall 
Fund, writes a monthly column for The Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/27/AR2006012701231.html?nav=hcmodule
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