Tag: Iran

by Patrick Appel

I wrote:

The strongest argument against engagement with Iran is not that any individual political actor in Iran is irrational, but that the country's leadership is divided against itself and that the warring political fractions are incapable of committing to any sort of international agreement. The green movement added to this disunity.

Kevin Sulivan makes a convincing rebuttal. His whole post is worth reading, but here are the first few paragraphs:

I really think this is, in short, the biggest problem with those who took on the Green banner and championed it so unflinchingly and uncritically since last summer's protests broke out. It's worth noting that many of those who adopted the Green Movement after June 12 were the same analysts and journalists who just months prior had tried their best to put a positive face on Iranian democracy. Once that reality was shaken, and a regime most already understood to be awful actually confirmed said awfulness, many of these same analysts and journalists were left shocked and searching for an explanation.

Along came the Green Movement: a young, cosmopolitan and liberal movement rooted in justice, democracy and Islam; the kind of thing you rarely hear about when Iran hawks clamor on about Ahmadinejad and the "Mad Mullahs." Here, finally, was something even the casual Western observer could get behind.

It's a great story, and it's one that will no doubt continue to be told. But it was always a modest movement seeking electoral reparations; at best "revolutionary" only on its lesser fringes.

Sullivan writes that the "Iranian regime is always divided, and if we were to take Appel's advice, the time for engagement would be never. " I was not advising against engaging an internally divided Iran but simply acknowledging that there are various nodes of power within the government and that the divisions make diplomacy difficult. To take just one example, the uranium enrichment deal fell through, in part, because of internal Iranian squabbling.

by Patrick Appel

Noah Pollak opines:

[A]cknowledging Russia and China’s unwillingness to help [with sanctions] would strike the most powerful blow yet to Obama’s central foreign-policy message: that his personality and eagerness for engagement would open up doors for America that were slammed shut by the Bush administration’s alleged arrogance and quickness to go to war. Acknowledging that the Security Council will never allow strong sanctions would be tantamount to admitting that the very logic and premises of Obama’s foreign policy is flawed. Thus, this isn’t really about Iran. It’s about the politics of failure and Obama’s increasingly desperate attempt to shield his presidency from the hard realities of the world.

And there is a practical reason why Obama may never admit that the Security Council is a dead end: doing so would force him to move to a new strategy — and there is no new strategy.

Greg Scoblete has a slightly different view. Larison thinks that US "objectives are unrealistic and unreachable":

Obama wanted to change the means the U.S. used to pursue the same unreachable end, namely the elimination or severe limitation of Iran’s nuclear program. What the administration and its hawkish critics have been unable to see is that it is the end, not the means, that needs to be changed.

by Patrick Appel

Frum attended a debate on Iran between Michael Ledeen and Flynt Leverett:

[Leverett] acknowledges past attempts at engagement – but those attempts narrowly focused on some specific tactical issue. Leverett claims Iranians have in fact cooperated on the issue on which engagement was sought. They thought by doing so they might prompt us to rethink our willingness to live with the Islamic republic. The historical record: typically its the American administration that pulls the plug on tactical cooperation, either because of domestic political blowback or in reaction to some other Iranian provocation unrelated to the area of cooperation. Leverett claims this is what happened in 2002: The Iranians were helpful on Afghanistan – their reward was to be labeled part of the axis of evil – and to see Afghan cooperation cut off.  Leverett argues that no president has ever proposed a “grand bargain.”  He asserts that Iranians would accept such a bargain – but his evidence for this proposition is lacking.

Full transcript of the debate here. Michael Ledeen's outlook is that every "American president has eventually come to the conclusion that we could make a grand bargain with Iran and has tried to do it." Ledeen:

What has changed?  Why would you think you could get a deal today when you couldn’t get a deal for 31 years?  I mean, surely none of us – even though everybody in Washington is famously egotistical – I doubt that anybody here thinks that he or she is more brilliant, more profound, more talented and so forth than all of the people who, for the past last 31 years, have tried to do this.

So why?  That’s my rhetorical question to the people who only want to engage or negotiate or try to strike a deal.  And, as I say, I’m not opposed to trying to strike a deal.  And if you can get one, god bless you.  I’m pessimistic.

by Patrick Appel

Matt Steinglass joins it:

My own instinct is that the prospects of any serious diplomatic gains from any Iran strategy are too uncertain to be worth calculated pursuit, and one might as well use this as an occasion to take a possibly unproductive stand for human rights, without resorting to counterproductive aggression. But I think the aggressive, pro-bombing stance is the only one that's clearly unacceptable and based on dangerous fantasies. Short of that, a lot of positions are acceptable, and none are likely to matter too much to the progress of Iran's heroic Green Movement. We can't do much about that except hope.

by Patrick Appel

Greg Scoblete joins the Leverett debate:

So let's pretend you're the Leveretts and here is Crowley angling for some expression of disgust with the Iranian regime. Yes, it's childish, but being veterans of Washington, you understand that the fastest way your (already unpopular) line of analysis can be discredited is if it is shown that you harbor real sympathies for the current crop of Iranian rulers, and not just an unsentimental view of engagement or a hyper-skeptical view of the Green Movement.

Do you play the game or not? Does it really cost you or your views of engagement anything to say you find the regime's anti-Semitic rhetoric vile and insulting?

Larison responds by comparing the Iran debate to the Iraq war debate: 

Before the invasion of Iraq, most opponents of the invasion felt compelled to hedge their statements with endless qualifications, they had to accept the reality of a non-existent WMD threat simply to participate in the conversation, and they often had to go out of their way to state their loathing and disgust for Saddam Hussein. As I have said many times before, this had the effect of undermining antiwar arguments from the very beginning. Having conceded that Hussein was a monster whose downfall they would happily welcome, and having accepted the key claim of the pro-war side that Iraq possessed WMDs and posed a grave threat to us all, many opponents of the war lost the debate before they had even stated their correct case that the war would be a strategic disaster and a terrible mistake. They allowed themselves to be psyched out by the cheap moralizing and shoddy reasoning of war supporters. These war opponents were desperately trying to avoid the smears that were already being used, but all they achieved was to deprive their arguments of whatever moral and rhetorical force they might have had.

Acknowledging reality, that Saddam had done unspeakable things, didn't doom the Iraq war opponents. Overly purple prose was a factor. Endorsing bad WMD reporting certainly didn't help. Still, overall, this is one of Larison's weaker posts. Perhaps we are talking past each other.  I am not asking the Leveretts to pound the table over human rights abuses in Iran. I am asking them wrestle with these tragedies and explain why they don't impact their analysis. Here's one of the Leverett's stronger arguments:

Andrew Sullivan and Scott Lucas criticized our comparison of the December 27 and December 30 crowds by discounting the larger numbers who turned out to support the Islamic Republic on December 30 on the grounds that some of the participants in the pro-Islamic Republic rallies were reportedly ordered to take part and received free transport, cake, and tea.  From a strategic perspective, the most important point here is the comparison between Iran today and in 1978-1979:  when protests started against the Shah, there was no level of state coercion or any amount of tea, cake, or free transportation that could bring significant numbers of people into the street to rally for the Pahlavi regime.  By contrast, the Islamic Republic retains an obvious and demonstrable capacity to elicit such manifestations of support—and that reinforces our argument that the Islamic Republic is not imploding.

This passage is effective because it acknowledges and explains inconvenient facts. Instead of undermining, this amplifies the "moral and rhetorical force" of the argument. Let's contrast the Leveretts with what I consider the single strongest article against the invasion of Iraq, Jim Fallows November 2002 tour de force:

I ended up thinking that the Nazi analogy paralyzes the debate about Iraq rather than clarifying it. Like any other episode in history, today's situation is both familiar and new. In the ruthlessness of the adversary it resembles dealing with Adolf Hitler. But Iraq, unlike Germany, has no industrial base and few military allies nearby. It is split by regional, religious, and ethnic differences that are much more complicated than Nazi Germany's simple mobilization of "Aryans" against Jews. Hitler's Germany constantly expanded, but Iraq has been bottled up, by international sanctions, for more than ten years. As in the early Cold War, America faces an international ideology bent on our destruction and a country trying to develop weapons to use against us. But then we were dealing with another superpower, capable of obliterating us. Now there is a huge imbalance between the two sides in scale and power.

If we had to choose a single analogy to govern our thinking about Iraq, my candidate would be World War I. The reason is not simply the one the historian David Fromkin advanced in his book A Peace to End All Peace: that the division of former Ottoman Empire territories after that war created many of the enduring problems of modern Iraq and the Middle East as a whole. The Great War is also relevant as a powerful example of the limits of human imagination: specifically, imagination about the long-term consequences of war.

There is much more that I could excerpt, but what Fallows does so well is directly address the emotional core of the case for war and disarm it. The Leveretts usually fail in this regard. 

Larison and Kevin Sullivan have both responded to my last post. I'll put up a response as soon as I can.

by Patrick Appel

Larison makes several points in response to my criticism of the Leveretts:

Should skeptics of the Green movement be more careful to qualify our claims? Perhaps. It is true that it is difficult to know what is happening inside Iran, but given these limitations shouldn’t it count in favor of the skeptics that we seem to have understood the balance of political forces in Iran much better than Green movement sympathizers and most Iran hawks? If skeptics have seemed a little too sure about things, how ridiculously overconfident have many other observers been? Have the latter been right about much of anything so far? On balance, whose arguments seem to be more in accord with reality? Shouldn’t that be the relevant measure in gauging the merits of what the Leveretts have had to say?

The Iranian state has not fallen, but the Leveretts have not been proven right. Worse yet, by making extreme statements they have damaged their side of the debate. Take this sentence from their June 24, 2009 op-ed:

[T]to this day, there is no hard evidence of electoral fraud — which even some Mousavi campaign aides privately acknowledge.

There sure was a lot of evidence that suggested fraud. There might not be "hard evidence" but there is "hard evidence" of very little in Iran given that the government is running interference. The Leveretts don't explain how Ahmadi won in areas that were political or ethnic strongholds of other politicians. Another line from the same article:

[T]he Iranian government responded to the post-June 12 protests in a manner consistent with its own constitutional procedures — and with far less bloodshed than when the Chinese government suppressed the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989.

As Andrew wrote at the time: "It's disgusting to diminish the violence on the ground, which we have only seen pieces of, by calling it constitutional and less awful than Tiananmen." The Leveretts write that they "certainly do not take glee in anyone’s death, injury, or incarceration." But re-reading their various op-eds it's difficult to find a single criticism of the Iranian government. The arrests, show trials, executions, torture, and rape of Iranian protesters hardly make an appearance. In this June 15, 2009 op-ed the Leveretts state –with absolute certainty– that Ahamdi won the election. The entire article has a 'move along, nothing to see here' quality.

Maybe the Leveretts are right and Ahmadi won the popular vote (I don't believe that but don't rule it out). Politicians are known to rig the vote, in order to intimidate political opponents, even when they are likely to win outright. Let's pretend that the Leveretts are right and Ahmadi won. That does not make the protests in Iran irrelevant. Hooman Majd said it well awhile back:

What is evident is that if we consider Iran's pro-democracy "green movement" not as a revolution but as a civil rights movement — as the leaders of the movement do — then a "win" must be measured over time. The movement's aim is not for a sudden and complete overthrow of Iran's political system. That may disappoint both extremes of the American and Iranian political spectrums, left and right, and especially U.S. neoconservatives hoping for regime change.

Seen in this light, it's evident that the green movement has already "won" in many respects, if a win means that many Iranians are no longer resigned to the undemocratic aspects of a political system that has in the last three decades regressed, rather than progressed, in affording its citizens the rights promised to them under Iran's own Constitution.

Mousavi's latest interview is in keeping with this understanding of the green movement.

I take no pleasure in character assassination, but the Leveretts have brought much of this upon themselves. Larison thinks that the Leveretts are being attacked "because of the policy course they recommend, which is significant, sustained engagement with Iran." And that what "Leveretts’ critics seem to want to do is identify this engagement approach with sympathy and collusion with the regime." That may be true of some Leverett bashers, but this is too simple. Dan Drezner has been one of the Leveretts' most constant critics. He's not exactly a hawk.

The Leveretts' substantive point, that we should engage with the Iranian government we have, is a serious position that deserves real debate. Arguing, without sufficient evidence, that Amadi won the election outright was not necessary to advance this position but doing so made made their position easier to defend, as did downplaying the protests and ignoring the violence. Pundits who advocate bombing Iran should address all the likely consequences of that action. Pundits who advocate engagement with Iran should recognize the crimes that the Iranian government has committed against its people.

Just because a fact is not convenient to the argument at hand does not mean you can disregard said fact. Ignoring the strongest evidence against a position opens one to charges of intellectual dishonesty and does not move the debate forward. It's intellectually lazy and it damages the discourse.

National Journal experts debate. Here's Paul Pillar:

The consequences of a military strike against Iran would be widespread, very costly, and highly damaging to U.S. interests. A sample of what to expect can be gleaned from a recent simulation organized by the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, which began with an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Before long there were Iranian missiles fired against Saudi Arabia as well as Israel, a skyrocketing of oil prices after closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and a worldwide Iranian terrorist campaign against the United States, amid other chaos and mayhem.

Larison moderates.

Frum lists probable consequences. He endorses gas sanctions, which have their own problems.

Fred Kaplan rebuts those claiming a nuclear Iran will lead to greater stability in the Middle East:

If the Iranians do manage to build some A-bombs, it's not at all certain—in fact, it's probably unlikely—that they will institute [the] same elaborate control devices [as other nuclear powers]. Especially given the schisms within the regime, we don't know who will have—or grab—the power to use them. (If it's the Revolutionary Guard, that's bad news.)

And if an Iranian bomb incites other powers in the region to build their own bombs for deterrence, that may "stabilize" tensions—by giving everyone a "deterrent"—though, more likely, it will make things worse. The other regimes probably won't have control devices, either, at least not at first. There's also the geographic factor: These countries are very close to one another; a nuclear-armed missile's flight time, from launcher to target, is a few minutes. In the event of a crisis, one nation's leader might launch a first strike to pre-empt an anticipated first strike by some other nation's leader. (If U.S. and Russian borders were only 100 miles apart, it's doubtful we could have survived the Cold War without a "nuclear exchange." This is one reason, by the way, that Soviet missiles in Cuba, and U.S. missiles in Turkey, were viewed with such alarm.)

Marc Lynch sizes up yesterday's events:

[T]he prospects for regime change have seemed to me less likely over time rather than more likely. During those chaotic first days after the "election" fiasco, there may have been the chance for a massive cascade to change things before the regime could rally itself. But it survived that (and would have, probably even more easily, [had] the Obama administration publicly taken a position). Since then, it has systematically repressed and divided the opposition, harrassed its leadership and members, and taken steps to shore up its instruments of control. The internet may or may not have played a decisive role in fueling the Green Movement, but either way the regime is now prepared to shut it down when necessary. The Shi'a tradition of commemorations and major national anniversaries do offer focal points for organization and mobilization, but it also tells the regime exactly where and when to expect protest activity. In short, I fully believe that the Iranian regime is more unpopular and less legitimate than ever before — but just don't see it as especially vulnerable at the moment.