DEFUSING NUCLEAR IRAN

“Democracy? Freedom? What do these words mean? I don’t want any part of them.”

- The Shah of Iran (1974)[i]

 “For the United States, trying to change the regime in Tehran is not just a lost cause, it would be a mistake. Whenever we have tried, we have ended up worse off than when we started.”

-          Kenneth Pollack (2004)[ii]

“This is a dynamic landscape, where the changes come by the day, by the hour. The force of popular will is now driving what was at first a dewy American project. It is a scenario developing amid tears, violence and near unprecedented public freedom of expression. Its mid-term consequences are still unclear, but few observers have kept pace with events.”

- Nicolas Rothwell (2005)[iii]

Will Iran be next? asked James Fallows last December.[iv] Next to be invaded by American forces, because it is on the verge of completing nuclear weapons. Iran probably will not be invaded, because of the daunting costs that could entail, but that means it may well complete nuclear weapons, which raises significant problems for both the non-proliferation regime and the balance of military power in the Middle East. Regime change in Iran would be a much better way to solve these problems.

The idea that the theocratic regime in Tehran might implode is not fanciful. It is deeply unpopular among its own people. Ayatollah Khomeini’s dream, of creating an Islamic state inspired as much by Plato’s Republic as by the Koran, has failed badly. Had it not been for its brutal political thuggery, the regime of the mullahs could well have ended some years ago. The momentum for change generated by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, in April 2003, and the holding of national elections in Iraq, in January this year, could bring things to the tipping point.

This is not, of course, a matter of certainty, but there is pretty good empirical evidence that a majority of Iranians are deeply disillusioned with radical Islam and want to see political reform in their country. Add to this the way the tide seems to have turned in much of the region and you have the makings of what could sweep the mullahs from power and bring a representative, multi-party democracy to Iran. This would not only bring considerable benefits to Iran itself, but would have profound implications for the whole struggle for ‘hearts and minds’ in the Islamic world. It would also open up the possibility of Iran abandoning its nuclear weapons program of its own volition – as South Africa did more than a decade ago.

If your reflexive response to the idea of regime change in Iran is scepticism, remember that, throughout 1989, as one Eastern European Communist regime after another toppled from power, conservatives and sceptics insisted that each was an exception and that the others would endure. Poland was supposedly unique. Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia had Catholic backgrounds. East Germany would not be let go by the Soviet Union. Romania was tougher and more backward than the rest. It was the last to go – then the Soviet Union itself imploded.

That something like this could be brought about in the Middle East was the great hope of those who encouraged the controversial invasion of Iraq two years ago. There is a long way still to go, but there is, at last, a sense of momentum. Charles Kurzman’s recent study of the genesis of Iran’s 1979 revolution suggests that this momentum could be the decisive catalyst.[v] It shows that revolutions in general have a certain unpredictable dynamic about them. They overturn regimes by upending expectations – as in the case of Eastern Europe, in 1989.

Kurzman’s case is that all the standard social scientific explanations for the downfall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini turn out to be falsified by intractable factual anomalies. According to the available evidence, the revolution of 1979 “shouldn’t have happened when it did, or at all.”[vi] Happen it did, however, like a social tsunami. Indeed, it was a far more popular revolution, in terms of mass participation, than the classic revolution of 1789 in France or the political earth tremor that finally brought down Soviet Communism.[vii]

His ‘anti-explanation’ for this is that various sets of circumstances can generate outbursts of mass protest, which take unpredictable turns, because they occur amid confusion, disrupt people’s expectations and overturn “one of the dominant premises of contemporary social science, the stability of preferences.”[viii]  This premise gives way under circumstances of acute social disturbance. From this, he draws a conclusion which brings to mind the spirit of the 1960s:

“If we want to change the world – and who doesn’t? – then we are marching boldly toward a situation of confusion, the moment when old patterns begin to be disrupted and new ones take their place. For change as significant as a revolution, we cannot know in advance who will cling to the old ways and who will embrace the new. All that remains is to pursue the goal for its own sake, because we consider it the right thing to do. All we can do is try to make the unthinkable thinkable. That is what Khomeini did. Whether or not we agree with his goals, we can learn from his pursuit of them.”[ix]

L’imagination au pouvoir, as they declared in Paris, in May 1968. All power to the imagination! But imagination is not enough. How power is shaped and exercised is absolutely crucial. Kurzman’s thinking here runs the risk of opening the door to the kind of disaster that occurred again and again in modern revolutions: ‘idealists’ taking advantage of confusion to seize power and then impose fascist, communist or theocratic tyrannies; as happened in Iran. Those hoping for moderate and liberating change get swept along by the tide of revolution, then subjected to a new regime that will brook no opposition.

This has been the great flaw of all the radical revolutions, since that in France in 1789. They failed abysmally in the task of creating constitutions of liberty and ended up, in short order, magnifying rather than overcoming tyranny. The 20th century ended with this lesson being, at last, more or less absorbed. The East European revolutions of 1989 were democratic ones, not ‘radical’ ones – American rather than French revolutions.[x] So it is now in the Middle East – or so it has begun. The vital task is to keep things developing on these lines. Iraq is a work in progress; the Palestinian Authority has made the merest of beginnings; Egypt and Syria are beginning to feel the pressure. Iran would be the greatest breakthrough.

Why? For three reasons. First, because Iran has, since 1979, been the heartland of the radical Islamist cause and a rallying point for all Muslim resentment of the West in general and the United States of America in particular. It has been the single most persistent sponsor of Islamist terrorism for a generation and a regime change could put an end to this era. Second, because the theocratic regime in Iran has failed its people and it is time to demonstrate that there is a better way to bring Muslim cultures into alignment with the modern world. Showing this in Iran would be especially potent precisely because radical Islam has been tried there and has failed.

The third reason, of course, is that it may be that only regime change can end Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons. If war is not a viable option, as most informed observers seem to believe, and if the existing regime will not change course short of war, then it follows that the downfall of that regime is the necessary condition for ending the nuclear weapons program. What is clear is that the social preconditions for a regime change exist in Iran and the momentum for change in the Middle East could provide what we might call the ‘Kurzman Shift’ in regime stability.

But why should Iran be harassed over its nuclear program? The question has two levels: what should be done about the wider set of circumstances in which Iran has chosen to build nuclear weapons; and what can be done in those circumstances to contain or remove the danger that such weapons might represent in the hands of Iran? The key consideration at the first level is the decision by the nuclear powers, the United States chief among them, to retain their own nuclear arsenals despite the end of the Cold War. The key consideration at the second level is how to handle Iran, if it cannot be dissuaded from completing nuclear weapons in the next couple of years.

In 1982, in The Fate of the Earth, Jonathan Schell deplored the vast nuclear arsenals in existence as a gigantic trap into which our whole species had stumbled.[xi] Twenty years passed without the trap being sprung. The Cold War even ended with the two nuclear superpowers agreeing to greatly scale down their nuclear stockpiles. Nonetheless, they both retained substantial nuclear arsenals. In 1998, in The Gift of Time, Schell argued that this could lead to a second round of nuclear arms races and a breakdown in the non-proliferation regime. Even as his new book went to press, India and Pakistan exploded nuclear weapons.[xii]

 Then came September 11, 2001. “If there proves to be a silver lining to the terrible events of September 11,” wrote Jessica Mathews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in 2002, “it may be that they restored proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to its rightful place at the top of the global security agenda and added a sense of urgency to controlling their continuing spread.”[xiii] They did exactly that, of course. What they did not do was add a sense of urgency to the abolition of such weapons. On the contrary, they seemed to reinforce a belief among the guardians of existing nuclear arsenals that these were necessary and safe; only such weapons in the hands of rogue states or terrorist groups were a problem.

Schell, as tireless an abolitionist as any of those who stood up against slavery in the nineteenth century, believes this is a compound delusion. It is bad enough for the United States to have held onto its nuclear arsenal for the purposes of ‘deterrence’ after the end of the Cold War but “after September 11, an even more radical departure from deterrence was announced – the doctrine of pre-emptive war. Its aim was to stop – or head off – nuclear proliferation by military force…But proliferation to new countries cannot be considered in isolation from possession of nuclear weapons by the old Cold War powers…the inescapable, underlying question is whether the possessors of nuclear arms will insist on keeping them indefinitely or will be prepared to accept their abolition.”[xiv]

Schell’s argument is weakened somewhat by the consideration that, overwhelmingly, the world’s states have voluntarily chosen not to acquire nuclear arms, despite their retention by the major nuclear powers. Those who have acquired them cannot, therefore, claim to have done so on the basis of a universal imperative. Moreover, those who have done so fall into two categories: the states which have never acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), because they believed both that it was inequitable and that they might need nuclear weapons; and those who have acceded to the NPT, but have then used it to cloak their quest for nuclear weapons in deceit.

Israel, India and Pakistan belong in the first category[xv]. Iraq belonged, while Iran and North Korea still belong in the second category. That all three had or have repressive regimes, anti-status quo agendas and track records of conducting or sponsoring terrorist acts has added to a sense that they constitute a particularly troubling case of nuclear weapons proliferation. It was not, after all, a desire to use nuclear weapons, but a fear that Hitler would get them first and use them indiscriminately which prompted Franklin Roosevelt to set up the Manhattan Project, early in the Second World War. That atomic bombs were then used by the United States against Japan has been a matter of moral controversy ever since and their use has not been repeated.[xvi]

Given these considerations, it is possible to acknowledge the first level problem without dismissing the second level one. There can be no defence on moral grounds, even given Schell’s argument, for Iran being permitted to both belong to the NPT and build nuclear weapons. Had it never joined the NPT, there would still be concern about it going nuclear, but given that, like Iraq under Saddam and North Korea, it has been cheating on commitments it freely undertook under the NPT, there is, at least, a clear case for international pressure against it to reverse course and abide by its commitments.

The question is, how can it be induced to do so? It is this situation and its deep historical background that Kenneth Pollack set himself to explore, in a book published late last year: The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America.[xvii] He spends a good deal of his book discussing the history of Iranian relations with America, on the basis that “Anyone who cannot master that history cannot understand how to move beyond it.”[xviii] He is correct in saying this, as he is in stating bluntly that “Americans are serial amnesiacs; as a nation, we forget what we have done almost immediately after doing it.”[xix]

Yet he proceeds to argue that, basically, America may have made the odd mistake in regard to Iran, but has almost always had good intentions and has erred more through benign neglect than willful purpose. The great exception is the decision, in 1953, famous in the annals of CIA covert operations, to engineer the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq and put Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back in control of Iran.[xx] Even in this case, however, he argues that the problem was more with Mossadeq than with the powers that be in Washington.[xxi]

James Bill, in 1988, in The Eagle and the Lion, was more trenchant and insightful in his account of US relations with Iran than Pollack in 2004, which is disconcerting, given how extensively Pollack draws on Bill in putting together his history of the matter up to 1988. He doesn’t appear to have reckoned with Bill’s argument that the American policy-making and intelligence system, as it applied to Iran between the early 1950s and the late 1980s, exhibited profound and enduring systemic flaws. Consequently, he doesn’t even ask whether those flaws have persisted. The problems with Iraq over the past three years might be seen as suggesting that they have. Yet his prescription for dealing with Iran depends on that policy-making and intelligence system functioning with a high degree of efficacy.

Before considering Pollack’s prescription, therefore, it is worth considering at least a few of James Bill’s insights of almost two decades ago. He remarked that Iran policy had been dominated by unexamined premises. The most notable one he called ‘the Pahlavi invincibility premise’ – that the Shah was a rock on which leftist or Islamic dissidents would break like water.[xxii] This premise, he argued, took hold in Washington after the death of President Kennedy – whom the Shah detested – and lasted right down to the debacle of 1978-79. When, in November 1978, Ambassador Sullivan cabled Washington that the time had come to consider “some options which we have never before considered relevant”, he headed the cable “thinking about the unthinkable.” President Carter wanted to sack him, as someone who could not be trusted with working to save the Shah’s regime.[xxiii]

Bill noted, further, that altogether insufficient attention was paid to developing foreign service and intelligence officers with the language skills and country experience to understand Iran outside the diplomatic cocktail circuit.[xxiv] He went on to remark that there was an obsession with secrecy and a conceit that secret cables somehow had more value than what could be found in open sources, if only one looked. This often generated the most extraordinary ignorance – covered up by the classification of government reports.[xxv]

There was a great need, Bill argued, for American foreign policy to “increase its emphasis on long-range analysis.”[xxvi] The upheaval in Iran in 1979 had caught the United States unprepared, because for years it had neglected to do such analysis. Unexamined assumptions, irresponsibly reinforced by superficial and self-satisfied scanning of the Shah’s arms purchases from America and his rhetoric about Iranian modernization, blinded official Washington to what was brewing. Lack of an intelligence cadre deeply familiar with the country vitiated political reporting and, when sound reporting did come in, there was an impulse to dismiss it and even to shoot the messenger. Truly, as Stansfield Turner remarked, after heading the CIA, “Analysis, especially political analysis, is the Achilles heel of intelligence.”[xxvii]

Bill’s overall conclusion, in 1988, is stunning when one considers the shock of 2001 and the current calls for reform of the intelligence and policy making system in the United States. The various problems he had highlighted, he declared, interlocked in “a system that highly resists reform” and, consequently, produces “a highly resilient system of errors.”[xxviii] The record of recent years cannot inspire confidence that this system has been reformed or that its resilience in the making of errors has lessened. As it now sets about dealing with Iran, this is of the greatest importance, because there is plenty of scope for error and its consequences could be particularly unpleasant.

If Pollack’s history is largely derivative and self-satisfied, his concluding reflection, ‘Toward a New Iran Policy’ is at least thoughtful and systematic. His major premise is that invasion is not an option the United States should choose. This is chiefly because the grounds adduced, in 2002, for invading Iraq do not obtain in the case of Iran. It’s regime is oppressive but not genocidal. Its leadership is strategically rational, not compulsively aggressive[xxix]. It is unlikely to supply terrorists with WMD.[xxx] It is four times as large and three times as populous as Iraq, with a terrain that would present formidable obstacles to an invader. Even a limited military option, intended to eliminate Iran’s nuclear facilities would be both problematic to carry out and possibly counter-productive in its consequences.

To military caution, Pollack adds political pessimism. He agrees that “there is considerable evidence – both anecdotal and quantitative – to show that most Iranians are unhappy with the regime. However, it is a giant leap from that to suggesting that they are on the brink of revolution…Most of the evidence indicates that Iranians are sick of revolutions and don’t want another one.”[xxxi] He has read Kurzman, but he appears to draw precisely the opposite conclusion to Kurzman himself: since the 1979 upheaval was unpredictable, such upheavals are inherently improbable and current evidence about popular preferences or moods is a reliable indicator of how things will remain.

Pollack quite reasonably concludes, then, that “Iran is a very hard problem”[xxxii], because none of the ‘obvious’ solutions work. Since it is not admissible to simply throw up one’s hands, he proposes a complex policy approach, which he calls ‘Triple Track’. These are the three tracks. First, hold open to Iran the prospect of a ‘grand bargain’ in which, if it plays no games and tells no lies, it will receive considerable benefits. These will be delivered over a protracted period and on a reversible basis, to ensure that it keeps the bargain. Second, while offering real ‘carrots’, wave real ‘sticks’, in the form of international sanctions. As part of this track, tighten the NPT regime to punish both suppliers and purchasers of illicit technologies and to prohibit “even civilian nuclear activities that could be related to weapons acquisition.”[xxxiii]

Third, prepare a new containment regime as a fallback position. This would require reconfiguring American military forces in the Persian Gulf region; laying down clear ‘red lines’ to deter Iranian aggression in the area; making unambiguously clear that any use by Iran of its nuclear arsenal would bring down the most dire consequences on its head; massively augmenting intelligence gathering on Iran; and consistently advocating democratization, the rule of law, human rights and religious tolerance in Iran. In short, settle in for a state of siege on Cold War lines, but with a substantially smaller and also perhaps less tractable adversary.

If Pollack is correct and no Kurzman Shift is likely to occur in Iran, at least for some considerable time, then something like Triple Track may be necessary. But, by his own account, it will be very difficult to sustain, especially the second track, because of what he openly and repeatedly describes as “the perfidy of our allies” – the Europeans and the Japanese – to say nothing of the Russians and the Chinese. Imposing sanctions on Iran proved impossible, for this reason, throughout the 1990s. Tightening the NPT is likely to run into similar problems, especially in the near term which is when it might, in principle, serve some useful purpose.

Problems in achieving multi-lateral action to reform the NPT will, in any case, have at their root the moral problem highlighted by Schell – that the big powers insist on keeping their nuclear weapons and practising what India’s Jaswant Singh, seven years ago, dubbed ‘nuclear apartheid’. Meanwhile, any attempt at Triple Track will have to be conducted by an intelligence and policy-making system that shows every sign of still suffering from the flaws James Bill pointed out in 1988. We could, therefore, be in for a rough ride on Iran. If there is hope for a constructive solution, though, it could well be that some form of containment and some degree of reform of the NPT, coupled with further political movement in the Middle East will trigger a Kurzman Shift in Iran. And if that happens, paradoxically, it may be that we shall have to acknowledge the invasion of Iraq as having opened up the possibility for transformation.