September 18, 2006
By Terry Walz, CNI Staff
A roster of speakers put together by the New America Foundation examined U.S. policy options toward Iran in Washington last week and mostly deplored the lack of leadership in the Bush administration and its refusal to engage in talks with the Iranians. The debate was framed around the question: to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons, does the U.S. attack preventively, does it live with a nuclear Iran, or does it offer concessions in a “grand bargain”?
Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Senate Minority leader, began the conference by admitting, “we are desperate for new ideas on Iran.” Another speaker, Flynt Leverett of the Brookings Institution, said that Iran was too important, a “rising power,” for the U.S. not “to get its policy right.” He pointed to several key strategic reasons why this was so: Iran’s role in determining the outcome in Iraq; and its future role in global energy that was equal to Saudi Arabia in importance.
In Washington, the debate on Iran is too often cast in dramatic unrealistic terms – each posing scenarios that are too awful to contemplate. On the one hand, the Neocons have been pressing for an outright attack on Iran – sooner rather than later – as a way to dealing with Iran’s declared aim to develop a nuclear weapon and its support for “terrorism.” On the other is the question of whether the United States and the Western world can tolerate a nuclear Iran. The conference panelists were asked to discuss the pros and cons of such argumentation.
After weighing the costs and benefits of the various options, most panelists condemned the military option as unrealistic and a real potential disaster. A preventive strike, as Christopher Preble of the Cato Institute pointed out, would only delay the development of a nuclear weapon, not eliminate it. Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan, pointed out how dependent the US army in Iraq was on oil supplied from the south through pipelines that were highly vulnerable to sabotage by an angry Shi’a-based militia, and that a US or Israeli attack could further destabilize Afghanistan, where the Karzai government maintains only minimal control.
Given the consensus that Iran may never relinquish the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon, on what terms should negotiations proceed? Many spoke of a “grand bargain” or package of terms that Iran would find too attractive to ignore. These included such options as an agreement with the United States to forgo a military attack, the lifting of sanctions, access to Western markets and investment, and a willingness to negotiate seriously a regional peace affecting the whole of the Middle East.
Israel’s position in U.S.-Iran relations is more cautious than some might think. Israeli leaders are aware of the dangers of attacking Iran, said Daniel Levy, a fellow this year at the New America Foundation, and would go along with any negotiation with Tehran that took into account Israel’s strategic needs (such as ending arms provisioning to Hezbollah). But any negotiation with Iran has to be in the context of a regional resolution of conflicts.
George Soros, the philanthropist and democratic activist, head of the Open Society Institute, believed neither a military attack against Iran nor a nuclearized Iran was acceptable, and pushed for other options, including a revision of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that would offer more powers and access to non-nuclear regimes, in the next five years – the time, he proposed, it would take Iran to become a nuclear power.
The fear in Washington is that despite the disastrous potential of a military option, it is still being seriously considered by the Department of Defense – which has until recently had the upper hand in determining policy in the Bush administration. If the Bush administration decided in favor of an attack, David Sanger, the New York Times correspondent asked, would it be able to come up with the evidence and how would they justify it to a wary American public still reeling under the lack of evidence for the war on Iraq?
According to Daphna Linzer, a Washington Post correspondent who has been following national security matters, it remains unclear what the government’s position on Iran is, whether it is willing to negotiate or not, whether it is willing to go through with UN-imposed sanctions or not. This does not bode well for opting for any real concessions that might be part of a “grand bargain.”
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