Opinion Roundup: What Can We Do About Iran

Los Angeles Times:

Preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons is a bit like achieving peace between the Israelis and Palestinians -- the steps we need to take are fairly obvious, but actually getting them done is all but impossible . . . .

[P]undits across the political spectrum are giving bad advice to President Obama. On the right, critics attack the president's attempts to negotiate directly with the regime and urge him to talk tougher, yet few reveal what that's supposed to accomplish. Eight years of that strategy under President George W. Bush not only failed to resolve the nuclear crisis but strengthened President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose defiance of Bush was wildly popular at home.

On the left, Obama has been accused of not being accommodating enough, with some urging the president to offer Tehran various incentives with no strings attached, as President Nixon did when he opened diplomatic relations with China in the 1970s. This ignores the nature of Iran's revolutionary regime, which defines itself by its opposition to the U.S.; there's little reason to think appeasement would change that, or end its desire to be a member of the world's nuclear club.

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The alternatives to engagement are appalling. Bombing Iran's nuclear facilities -- the option that Israel has been lobbying and training its pilots for -- would, at the very best, only delay a nuclear bomb by a few years. It would turn the probability that Iran is making the bomb into a certainty. While there is evidence that Iran is gaining the knowledge and the capacity to build a bomb, that is different from saying that the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has taken the decision to go ahead with a military programme. A strike on Iran's uranium enrichment facilities would make that decision for him. An air strike would not be brief, nor surgical. It would be the start of a conflagration that would spread rapidly from the Strait of Hormuz to Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. Israel's military planners argue that this is a price worth paying. The price would be so heavy and the reverberations would be so wide that it is not for Israel to make that call.

Would tougher sanctions work? In a word, no. We have seen what effect they had on Saddam Hussein. They allowed him to pin a "Made in America" label on the misery Iraqis endured, while he carried on building all the palaces he wanted.

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President Obama is doing precisely what he campaigned on, namely, to open a dialogue with Iran. It's an effort that began with his comments on Iran during his inaugural address, his videotaped Nowruz message to Iran last winter, a pair of quiet messages to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's leader, and Obama's careful and balanced response to the post-election crisis over the summer. Once started, the talks aren't likely to have a swift conclusion, but the very fact that they're taking place will make it impossible for hawks to argue successfully either for harsh, "crippling" sanctions on Iran or for a military attack.

That didn't stop Bibi Netanyahu, for one, from trying. Speaking to Israel's foreign affairs and defense committee today, the Israeli leader said: "I believe that now is the time to start harsh sanctions against Iran . . . ." Netanyahu's belief in sanctions, harsh measures, and regime change was echoed by John Hannah, the former top aide to Vice President Cheney, who wrote an op/ed criticizing Obama for taking regime change off the table in dealing with Iran.

Hannah utterly ignored the fact that eight years of anti-Iran, pro-regime change bombast from the Bush-Cheney administration did nothing but strengthen Iran's hawks, while Obama's softer, dialogue-centered approach to Iran helped boost the power of the reformists and their allies in Iranian politics. Indeed, it was precisely Obama's less belligerent tone that confused the Iranian hardliners, emboldened the liberals, reformists and pragmatists in Iran, and therefore did more to create the conditions for "regime change" than anything that Bush, Cheney, and Hannah did.

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Any delay in sanctions is dangerous. Failure to abide by deadlines and red lines heightens the chance of miscalculation as Tehran will only conclude that it can act with impunity. Proponents of diplomacy may chafe at labeling Obama's rush to engage as naive. After all, President Richard Nixon flew to China and, at the height of the Cold War, President Ronald Reagan talked to the Soviet Union. The comparison, however, underlines Obama's weakness. Even as they talked, neither Nixon nor Reagan suspended military preparations.

Indeed, it was Reagan's willingness to build and use both the U.S. military and covert capacity that catalyzed Soviet defeat. If the world is to avoid war or a nuclear Iran, talk is not enough. Engagement is a tactic, not a strategy.

If Obama waits to prepare militarily until talks run their course, then the United States will fail. Military preparations take months. The Iranian leadership will not engage sincerely until faced with a credible threat, nor will European allies -- let alone Russia and China -- make concessions if they see the commander in chief twiddling his thumbs. The military option should be the last resort. The irony is that without a finger on the trigger, diplomacy will fail.

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What the world has not focused on is the one thing Iran's rulers care about: their own survival . . . .Western democrats, not knowing what it is like to rule by fear and force, generally underestimate what a scary and uncertain business it can be, how a single wrong move, usually a too-timid response, can spell catastrophe . . . .[T]he regime's violent crackdown, its mass arrests of opposition figures -- including the children of high-ranking clerics -- and all the farcical show trials have been signs of weakness and anxiety, not confidence.

In such situations, an autocratic regime's biggest fear, well-grounded in history, is that domestic opponents may gain the support of powerful foreign patrons . . . .It is obvious from the show trials in Iran, where the accused have "admitted" being part of various American plots to overthrow the regime in a "velvet revolution," that this is the clerics' principal fixation . . . .

The Obama administration has, perhaps unwittingly, been a most cooperative partner. It has refused to make the question of regime survival part of its strategy. Indeed, it doesn't even treat Iran as if it were in the throes of a political crisis. President Obama seems to regard the ongoing turmoil as a distraction from the main business of stopping Iran's nuclear program. And this is exactly what the rulers in Tehran want him to do: focus on the nukes and ignore the regime's instability.