[Mb-civic] Bush's Choice on Iran - Jackson Diehl - Washington Post
Op-Ed
William Swiggard
swiggard at comcast.net
Mon Jan 30 03:54:46 PST 2006
Bush's Choice on Iran
By Jackson Diehl
Monday, January 30, 2006; A17
The debate on Iran is drifting toward the ugly question that the Bush
administration would most like to avoid. That is: Is it preferable for
the United States to live with the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran,
or with those of a unilateral American military strike against Iranian
nuclear facilities?
President Bush has never answered that question; instead, he and his
State Department have repeatedly called an Iranian bomb "intolerable"
while building a diplomatic coalition that won't tolerate a military
solution. But two of our more principled senators, Republican John
McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian
Choice -- and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct:
"There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a
military option," he said on "Face the Nation." "That is a nuclear-armed
Iran."
It's easy to see why the Bush administration prefers ambiguity to
McCain's decisive judgment. After all, both options are terrible, and
everyone can agree that diplomacy is worth a try. Yet Bush and both
parties in Congress ought to be thinking through their own answers to
the Iranian Choice, for two reasons. First, it looks more likely than
not that the United States will, in the end, have to make that decision;
and, second, the answer to the question ought to shape how the coming
diplomatic phase is managed.
One driver of the choice is the ranting of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust -- which, contrary to what a
Western secular sensibility might suggest, is not necessarily a bluff.
As Lieberman put it in his "Face the Nation" appearance a week ago, "if
we should have learned one thing from 9/11 . . . it is that when
somebody says over and over again, as Osama bin Laden did during the
'90s, 'I hate you and give me the chance, I will kill you,' they may
mean it and try to do it." If the West is going to gamble that it can
contain a religious fanatic who possesses nuclear weapons and vows to
wipe Israel from the map, it should do so knowingly, and not because it
failed to provide for the possibility that an extremist would not
respond to conventional diplomacy.
Another decision forcer is that, for all the talk among Iran watchers
about opposition within the regime to Ahmadinejad, there is no evidence
that anyone in Tehran disagrees with his judgment about negotiations
with the West -- which is that Iran has no need to make a deal. Iranian
leaders were universally dismissive of the offer made last summer by the
European Union. There is no indication that any senior leader or faction
favors giving up uranium enrichment, under any circumstances. Not even
the democratic opposition wants it.
So the United States must approach the coming maneuvering in and outside
the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency board, and
any last-minute negotiations in Vienna, Moscow or Tehran, the way the
Iranians probably do: not as an end in itself but as a prelude to more
meaningful action. If the ultimate intent is to contain, rather than
attack, the Iranian nuclear program, then dilatory and fruitless
negotiations -- like those of the past two years -- are worthy and even
desirable. Not only do they slow Iran's bomb-building but they help to
cement a global coalition that might be able to deter the regime from
actually using an eventual weapon over a long twilight era, Cold War-style.
If this is the choice, then aggressive efforts to support the Iranian
democratic opposition also make sense, since over time the regime might
be undermined from within. Russia and China should be courted.
Brinkmanship -- like interrupting Iranian oil exports, or prompting
Tehran to do so -- is to be avoided, since there is no military option
to fall back on if the mullahs don't blink.
On the other hand, if McCain is right, then the current diplomatic
campaign should be compressed. As in the case of Iraq, the United
Nations and sanctions should be explored just long enough to show that
the United States has tried them. That's because the timeline for
military action is much shorter than that of containment: While it might
not complete work on a weapon for five or even 10 years, according to
most intelligence estimates, Iran will probably pass what Israel calls
the "point of no return" far sooner. After that point, when Tehran will
have acquired all the means it needs to manufacture a bomb, it would be
considerably more difficult to stop the Iranian program by force. So, if
military action is preferable to containment, then brinkmanship is
called for, while promotion of Iranian democracy, or painstaking
cultivation of Russia and China, is a waste of time.
So what is the Bush administration doing? It is allowing talks to drag
on, and slowly courting Russia and China, but doing next to nothing to
help Iranian democrats; it is drawing up lists of sanctions that, if
imposed, might trigger a crisis, but it is also laying the groundwork
for long-term containment. Perhaps the president has decided what course
he will choose if Iranian uranium enrichment proceeds in spite of
negotiations, U.N. resolutions or even sanctions. If so, his
administration's current tactics show no sign of it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/29/AR2006012900687.html?nav=hcmodule
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