by James A. Russell
The image of the finger-wagging Israeli Prime Minister at the United Nations this week provides the international community with a powerful message: the world — and the United States — must tirelessly search for “yes” as an answer in solving the world’s problems.
Israel’s persistent “no” model in seeking [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
The image of the finger-wagging Israeli Prime Minister at the United Nations this week provides the international community with a powerful message: the world — and the United States — must tirelessly search for “yes” as an answer in solving the world’s problems.
Israel’s persistent “no” model in seeking accommodation with its various antagonists is exactly the wrong approach — one that has placed it outside most acceptable norms of international behavior. A world of persistent war and confrontation may suit Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, but it does not serve American or global interests.
After years of confrontation over its nuclear program and support for terrorism, the outstretched hand of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to the US and the international community provides an opening for both countries to end the state of undeclared war that has raged between them since 1979. Arriving at a settlement to end this state of overt hostility and bringing Iran back into the global community of nations would make the world a safer place.
To be sure, taking “yes” for an answer from your antagonists can be difficult. American foreign policy is full of examples. During the Cold War, the United States (through Republican and Democrat administrations) simultaneously negotiated arms reductions with its mortal enemy, the Soviet Union, while they were also engaged in a bitter and dangerous international rivalry.
It was a difficult political sell at home. Hardline Republicans and, at the time, neoconservative Democrats, opposed any compromise with an adversary that many argued was inherently evil, untrustworthy and bent on our destruction. It took great political courage for President Richard Nixon and his successors to pursue the arms control talks while American versions of Netanyahu lectured them on the dangers of such a folly.
Luckily for us, we reached an arrangement with our adversary and took “yes” as the answer to limiting our respective nuclear arsenals, which also helped manage our political relationship. The unintended consequences of arriving at “yes” in the nuclear arena helped us to arrive at a series of subsequent agreements with Russia that will see substantial reductions in our respective nuclear arsenals over the next decade. The world will be a safer place for it.
More recently, the disastrous consequences of abandoning the “yes” policy option stares the United States in the face. America’s 8-year war in Iraq in no small measure unfolded over a 15-20 year period during which the United States boxed itself in politically by refusing to take “yes” from its adversary Saddam Hussein. In 1997, the US foreclosed any “yes” options in Iraq when it formally adopted regime change as its official policy — a decision that, at the time, had everything to do with domestic politics and little to do with a sensible strategy.
I was among the audience in 1997 as a Pentagon staffer when then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University explaining the US policy of supporting regime change in Iraq. Neither I nor anyone else could foresee the consequences of slamming the door on the possibility of taking a “yes” answer from Saddam Hussein. Earlier that year, I had initialed an internal policy paper to my boss, Secretary of Defense William Cohen, urging him to lobby the senior reaches of the Clinton administration to seek a deal with Saddam — a suggestion that surprisingly made it to his desk but that was of course never taken seriously.
Following the Albright speech, the Clinton administration allowed itself to be forced by neoconservatives and others into adopting the ill-conceived Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that formalized regime change into law — a law subsequently cited in the October 2002 authorization for the use of military force against Iraq. The war that followed was a human, economic and military disaster for all its participants, but the path to war had stretched back into the 1990s by a series of seemingly innocuous decisions that had foreclosed accommodation and the possibility of “yes.”
These two foreign policy episodes represent opposite poles for American decision makers and, to be sure, simplify the challenges of arriving at “yes” with adversaries. The arms control agreements that were reached with the Soviet Union resulted from years of painstaking work by committed public servants from both sides through the ups and downs of the overall political relationship. They happened because both parties shared an interest in a “yes” outcome and were prepared to take steps to convince each other about their seriousness.
In the case of Iran, the United States has every incentive to similarly pursue “yes” as the answer and should be under no illusions that the process will be any easier than it was with the Soviet Union. The polarized and fractured domestic political landscape that is exploited by the Israel lobby and others presents the Obama administration with a serious political challenge. As illustrated by the Sept. 23 letter to Obama signed by 79 Senators, the overwhelming preference seems tilted towards “no” and continued pressure and confrontation. Netanyahu further amplified the volume for this approach at the UN this week.
Interestingly, the issues facing the two antagonists pale in comparison to those faced in the US-Soviet Cold War conflict. The path to a US-Iran deal is relatively clear: Iran must honor its obligations as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), open its facilities at Fordow and Parchin for inspection as called for in the treaty, agree to implement the Additional Protocol, and provide the requested information to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about its past nuclear research that was almost certainly part of an illicit weapons program. In short, Iran must agree to have a nuclear program with the kind of transparency that’s called for by the NPT. For its part, the United States must agree to lift sanctions and be ready for an agreement to reach a broader political accommodation if Iran takes these steps. All should recognize that, as was the case with the Soviet Union, such agreements depend on reasonable verification steps and confidence building measures by both parties that demonstrate a commitment to “yes.”
The Obama administration’s stumbling into a “yes” answer with Syria, which may result in the elimination of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons stockpile, suggests that keeping policy options open for solutions that may not be immediately apparent can result in positive outcomes.
The United States needs to keep “yes” on the table as a solution to its standoff with Iran and resist the pressure from those who seem to prefer war and confrontation. The world will be a safer place if we can get to a “yes” with our adversary; after more than a decade of war in the Middle East, it is our responsibility to focus our best efforts on this challenging endeavor.
Photo: Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev signing a joint communiqué on the SALT Treaty in Vladivostok, November 24, 1974
]]>Shortly after President Obama’s startling telephone conversation with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, a Saudi Arabian journalist wrote that “The phone call between Obama and Rouhani shocked the Gulf states, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and other countries.” No matter which president initiated the call, he wrote, “What is important to know is what stands [...]]]>
Shortly after President Obama’s startling telephone conversation with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, a Saudi Arabian journalist wrote that “The phone call between Obama and Rouhani shocked the Gulf states, Jordan, Turkey, Israel, and other countries.” No matter which president initiated the call, he wrote, “What is important to know is what stands behind the conversation and how deep the ties are between America and Iran.”
Never mind that there are no “ties” between Washington and Tehran, let alone “deep” ones. His article reflected concern among Saudis that the United States might negotiate some wide-ranging settlement of its issues with Iran and that any such deal would automatically be detrimental to Saudi interests.
Such anxiety has surfaced in Riyadh many times over the past two decades, dating to Madeleine Albright’s unsuccessful efforts to reach out to Iran when she was secretary of state in Bill Clinton’s second term. No doubt many prominent Saudis share the journalist’s sentiment, not just in the ruling family but in the Sunni religious establishment. In their short-sighted view, regional security is a zero-sum game: if it benefits Iran, it must be bad for Saudi Arabia. To this group, as the authors of a major RAND Corp. study noted in 2009, “the prospect of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement (or even near-term coordination on Iraq) would appear to jeopardize the privileged position Riyadh has long enjoyed in Gulf affairs.”
Since that study appeared, Saudi antipathy to Iran has only increased. Iran’s growing influence in Iraq, its all-out support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and its perceived instigation of civil unrest in Bahrain have exacerbated Saudi anxieties and reinforced the kingdom’s determination to keep Iran isolated and economically constrained. At the same time, the Saudi perception that the United States abandoned Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally, and might do the same to them if regional circumstances changed, has led some Saudis to doubt the long-term reliability of the United States as anchor of the kingdom’s security. Their doubts were not alleviated when panelists at a Gulf security conference in Washington earlier this year projected a reversal of the regional alignment over the coming decade, with Iran emerging as more friendly to the United States and Saudi Arabia less so.
The Saudis have also been peeved about the inability of the United States to deliver on its commitment to a two-state solution that would end the Arab-Israeli conflict. That diplomatic stalemate has allowed Iran, which refuses to acknowledge Israel’s existence and openly supports Hezbollah, to present itself to the Arab world as the true champion of justice for the Palestinians, as opposed to the Saudis, who have offered a comprehensive plan for peace with Israel.
Furthermore, the Saudis went all-in to try to engineer the ouster of Assad, believing that they were in tune with U.S. policy. Now they may be feeling exposed as the United States and Russia appear to be pursuing a different course.
And it is certainly true that many of Saudi Arabia’s leading officials, including some diplomats in the foreign ministry, harbor a deep loathing for, and suspicion of, all things Shia. A softer U.S. line on Iran would not make those Saudis more comfortable in the bilateral relationship.
Moreover, the Rouhani initiative, assuming it is genuine rather than cosmetic, coincides with a growing realization in Saudi Arabia that the United States is becoming steadily less dependent on Gulf oil. Could the Obama administration’s announced shift of strategic resources to Asia presage a reduction of U.S. commitments in the Gulf? Senior U.S. officials say no: Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a few months ago that “You can take it to the bank” that the U.S. will maintain its posture in the Gulf for the foreseeable future.
Thus, recent reports of anxiety in Riyadh about a possible shift in relations between Washington and Tehran were predictable, and may well have some basis in fact.
But there are also Saudis who understand that a better relationship between Washington and Tehran might actually benefit the kingdom. After all, the two countries shared a strategic alignment with the United States before the Iranian revolution. In that era, Iran was far more powerful than Saudi Arabia militarily and economically, but the Saudis did not perceive it as a strategic threat, partly because it was influenced by the United States and partly because Saddam Hussein’s Iraq provided a protective buffer — a buffer that the United States dismantled with its invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
Even during the past decade, when tensions were high over Lebanon, Bahrain, Iraq and other issues, the Saudis and Iranians found ways to work cooperatively when it was in the interests of both countries. “Such calculations often take place independently of U.S. pressure or encouragement,” the RAND report noted, adding that in past times of tension with Washington the Saudis have been more flexible, rather than less so, in their regional rivalries.
“With the ‘moderation’ discourse strengthened during the presidency of recently elected Hassan Rouhani, pragmatism will be enhanced in Iran’s regional policy,” the columnist Kayhan Barzegar, an experienced analyst of Gulf affairs, predicted in the online magazine al-Monitor after Rouhani was inaugurated. “This development will weaken the existing ‘mutual threat’ perception between Iran and Saudi Arabia that is rooted primarily in the policies of both countries in response to regional issues. Such a development will also consequently strengthen relations between the two. Iran and Saudi Arabia are not interested in an intensification of sectarian or geostrategic regional rivalries. They are well aware that such rivalries will eventually be instrumentalized and used politically, draining energy from both sides. The result will be increased instability and growth of extremist trends in their backyard. Conflict between the two also provides an opportunity for other rival actors, such as Turkey and Qatar, to play an active role in regional issues at their expense, such as happened with the Syrian crisis, which is not currently welcomed by the Iranians or the Saudis.”
In fact, there are several ways in which a lessening of tensions between Iran and the United States could actually benefit Saudi Arabia. To achieve some form of rapprochement with the United States now, Iran would be required to forgo definitively any attempt to build or acquire nuclear weapons — a development that could hardly be depicted as detrimental to Saudi interests. The United States would also press Iran to curtail the aggressive policies that have destabilized the region for years. If Iran’s leaders truly want relief from international economic sanctions, they will have to persuade the countries that imposed them that they will be good neighbors to Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. Would that not assuage some of the security concerns that have prompted Saudi Arabia to spend tens of billions of dollars on new U.S. weapons?
If Iran were to curtail its support for Hezbollah in order to improve relations with Washington and the West, it might forfeit its position as “more Arab than the Arabs” on the issue of Israel, another development that could be to Saudi Arabia’s advantage.
And Saudi Arabia’s Gulf neighbors such as Qatar might no longer feel the need to hedge their bets by keeping some distance between themselves and Saudi Arabia and maintaining correct relations with Iran, thus facilitating Saudi Arabia’s desire to exert the regional leadership to which it feels entitled.
On a visit to South Asia when she was secretary of state, Albright chided the Pakistanis for opposing a U.S. initiative to expand economic ties with India. The initiative was not aimed at undermining Pakistan, she said, and might actually be helpful if an expanding Indian economy brought greater cross-border trade.
The Pakistanis didn’t buy it, but that did not diminish the validity of her message. It might be useful now for Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry to explain to the Saudis that any deal with Iran will be a long time in the making and will not damage U.S. ties with Riyadh unless the Saudis want it that way.
– Thomas W. Lippman is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute and author of Saudi Arabia on the Edge.
Rolf Ekéus, who was executive chairman for the UN Special Commission on Iraq between 1991 and 1997, writes with Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a nuclear expert at Standford University, on the parallels between the run-up to the Iraq War and the present state of negotiations between Tehran and the international community.
Rolf and Braut-Heggehammer place the onus [...]]]>
Rolf Ekéus, who was executive chairman for the UN Special Commission on Iraq between 1991 and 1997, writes with Målfrid Braut-Hegghammer, a nuclear expert at Standford University, on the parallels between the run-up to the Iraq War and the present state of negotiations between Tehran and the international community.
Rolf and Braut-Heggehammer place the onus for the collapse of UN inspection efforts in Iraq on the Clinton Administration’s decision to explicitly denote US policy in Iraq as regime change, effectively abandoning the post-Desert Storm “dual containment” strategy and laying the groundwork for the Bush Administration’s 2003 decision to go to war:
Between 1991 and 1997, Iraq moved steadily forward with disarmament. Even as it did so, of course, Iraqi leaders tested the resolve of the international community by frequently obstructing the inspectors. But the regime was determined to get the United Nations to lift the sanctions and realized that the international community remained committed to enforcing the cease-fire terms. So between 1995 and 1997, Iraq cooperated more thoroughly. By the first few months of 1997, Iraq had completed the disarmament phase of the cease-fire agreement and the United Nations had developed a monitoring system designed to detect Iraqi violations of the nonproliferation requirement.
At this point, several members of the Security Council argued that it was time to conduct a full review of Iraq’s progress in preparation for lifting the sanctions. But the United States took a different view. In the spring of 1997, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech at Georgetown University in which she stated that even if the weapons provisions under the cease-fire resolution were completed, the United States would not agree to lifting sanctions unless Saddam had been removed from power.
With regime change now a stated U.S. objective and the easing of economic sanctions off the table, Saddam lost his appetite for cooperation. He foiled the inspectors at every turn and finally ousted them after a 1998 U.S.-British bombing campaign targeting Saddam’s headquarters, air defenses and security organizations that was allegedly intended to weaken Iraq’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The UN Security Council could not rally together in support of the inspection regime or reform the sanctions, and misinformation about Iraqi weapons capabilities spread. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration used faulty assessments of the country’s WMD program to make the case for war. Due to the information vacuum that followed the four-year absence of inspections, those allegations could not be easily countered. If monitoring had remained in place, the international community would have been confident in the fact that Iraq’s ability to make WMD had not been reconstituted. A costly war could have been avoided.
The authors recommend the US reevaluate past third-party deals suggested by non-US actors between Iran and the West:
]]>Iran has developed the capability to enrich uranium to 20 percent and has explored aspects of weaponization. The most recent IAEA report shows that Iran’s enrichment capability is increasingly diversified and robust. Faced with these new facts on the ground, the United States will have to rethink making an agreement with Iran. The alternatives are worse. Military strikes will effectively remove the domestic constraints on the effort to develop nuclear weapons. Iran’s weapons program will go from dormant to overdrive.
Two years ago, Iran agreed to a Brazilian-Turkish fuel-swap proposal under which Iran could develop nuclear power without accumulating raw material for nuclear weapons. Last year, Russia put forth a plan imposing a number of restrictions on Iranian enrichment and facilitating more intrusive IAEA inspections. Neither proposal was supported by the United States, as the Obama administration’s top priority was to intensify international pressure on Tehran. Now, given Iran’s progress toward building the bomb, any new proposal should include an intrusive monitoring system with an early-warning mechanism inside Iran’s nuclear establishment. Such a requirement would help prevent a breakout program, as Iran would recognize that evidence of such activities would lead to military strikes and additional severe economic sanctions. The agreement would also have to be accompanied with a list of clearly defined steps that Iran could take to achieve the lifting of sanctions.
(For an opposite — and vastly overwrought — view of this history from the left, check out this post from Matthew Taylor at Mondoweiss.)
This reading of history may or may not be true — I can’t say I have the personal documentation to prove it either way. (Certainly, some of Iran’s clerics — but not all; some opposition figures are mullahs, too — have culpability in last summer’s repression of democracy, as Takeyh rightly adds at the end of his piece.) But I can say that all I have read on the subject presents the CIA efforts — “Operation Ajax” — as a major part of the coup. Stephen Kinzer’s excellent book, “All the Shah’s Men,” is one such source, as is the memoir of CIA operative who organized the covert actions, Kim Roosevelt (Takeyh mentions the latter, and dismisses it as a self-serving inflation of the U.S. role).
But another question about this op-ed is, why now?
It is fair enough to ask the historical question at the anniversary of the event — if the clerical structure did play such a role, it should cop to it, of course — but it seems out of place, amid the heated rhetoric of bombing runs on Iran, to blame the “mullahs” for sins that the last two Democratic administrations have admitted to. In 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright confirmed a U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow and in his Cairo speech in June of 2009, Obama admitted it as well (“In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.”).
As noted before here at LobeLog, Takeyh wrote another Post op-ed last month that seemed to be enabling the hawks who call for a strike — a step-by-step of how to prepare the diplomatic and military logistics of such a bombing run. The fact that Takeyh is a liberal-leaning centrist, and a Democratic adviser casts his positions on Iran in a different light.
If this article were to be accepted as policy, as the ideas of think-tank scholars are meant to be, the roll-back of previous U.S. admissions would certainly feed into the paranoia of both the clerics currently in charge as well as ordinary Iranians. The U.S. administration of Barack Obama, so far as they would be concerned, would obviously not be trustworthy, immediately quashing any potential further negotiations.
It may be that the trust deficit between the United States and Iran is already too great. But why, at this late stage, push the sides further apart?
]]>But are there more instructive lessons to take away from the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s, when Iraq was under blockade with the ostensible aim of keeping weapons out of Saddam Hussien’s hands? (Does this sound familiar yet?) Andrew Cockburn’s essay in the July 22 London Review of Books is a good place to start.
Some of the facts throughout his review of Joy Gordon’s book, “Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions,” will be new to many people. For instance, Yemen, which had a seat on the security council, had all their U.S. aid cut three days after casting a ‘no’ vote to UN sanctions. And some reatlities from the 1990s are so startling that Cockburn only serves to remind: Infant mortality in Iraq rising from 1 in 30, in 1990, to 1 in 8, in 1997.
The U.S. initially imposed sanctions on Iraq while Saddam’s army was still exploring Kuwait. At the time, writes Cockburn:
Iraqi sanctions were popular at first among the liberal-minded because they appeared to offer an alternative to war. As the Bush administration’s determination to go to war became clearer, allowing sanctions ‘time to work’ became a rallying cry for the peace party.
Sanctions, however, didn’t work in the early 1990s, and Iraq was invaded. Saddam was pushed back to his own border with Kuwait, and no farther. Neocons, riding high at the “end of history,” pushed for a full invasion, but lost out to realists in the George H.W. Bush administration.
But Bush continued sanctions against Iraq, officially waiting to confirm that Saddam didn’t have those elusive “weapons of mass destruction.” In short order, however, Bush established that sanctions were aimed at regime change. Cockburn digs up a quote from then-deputy national security adviser and now-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, which confirmed Bush’s shift:
“Saddam is discredited and cannot be redeemed. His leadership will never be accepted by the world community. Therefore,” Gates continued, “Iraqis will pay the price while he remains in power. All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.”
Within a few years, everything from salt, to paint, to kids bikes were banned from entering Iraq. A humanitarian crisis unfolded, and there was Saddam Hussein, still on top. As Cockburn notes:
If the aim of such a comprehensive embargo had indeed been the dictator’s overthrow, its perpetrators might have pondered the fact that it was having the opposite effect. Saddam, whose invasion of Kuwait had led to the disaster, was now able to point to the outside powers as the source of Iraqis’ suffering.
Now, here’s an important point: The set-up for the second Gulf War came out of a Democratic presidency, where soon-to-be Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that the death of Iraqi children was “worth it,” a quote Cockburn usurps for the title of his essay. It was Albright who, at that top diplomatic post a year later, announced that the U.S. opposed weapons inspectors who wanted to declare Iraq in compliance with International demands on its weapons programs.
Take it away, Cockburn:
]]>This provoked an escalating series of confrontations between the UNSCOM team and Iraqi security officials, ending in the expulsion of the inspectors, claims that Saddam was “refusing to disarm,” and, ultimately, war.
…[T]he West should think carefully before once again deploying the ‘perfect instrument’ of a blockade.