Conservative hawks, who just a few weeks ago were eager to drop bombs on Iran, have not hesitated to take advantage of the recent political unrest to launch criticisms on President Barack Obama for being insufficiently concerned with the welfare of the Iranian people. In its most extreme guises, this criticism has taken the form of National Review writers accusing Obama of having an active preference for tyranny. Victor Davis Hanson alleges that Obama is “almost more at ease with virulent anti-Westerners.” Andy McCarthy deems Obama “steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment” and thus eager to embrace theocracy. However, McCarthy continues, the president recognizes that it “would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs” and thus chose to mask his hidden pro-dictatorship views behind a veneer of calm and restraint.
These are outliers (though they were published on the Web site of the right’s flagship publication), but toned-down versions of the same basic complaint can be found all over the place. The Washington Post‘s Charles Krauthammer slammed Obama on June 19 for “the abject solicitousness” with which Obama referred to Ayatollah Ali Khameini as Iran’s supreme leader. Never mind that less than a week earlier Krauthammer himself was using the term.
John McCain and a passel of House Republicans piled on, while Robert Kagan — often said to be the “good” neocon — alleged Obama was “siding with the Iranian regime” by restraining his rhetoric.
Interestingly, actual Iranians seemed to have no such concerns. Instead, they generally supported the White House’s view that heavy-handed foreign intervention into the crisis would be counterproductive. Back on June 16, Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council told Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent that Obama’s remarks up to that point were “completely on point” and that Obama had appropriately ensured “that the issue is Iran, not the U.S.”
As the regime’s counterstrikes escalated in Iran, so did the opposition’s anti-regime rhetoric, and eventually Iranian dissidents did start looking for the White House to make a stronger statement. This led up to Obama’s semi-chorographed back-and-forth with the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney, in which a question submitted via Pitney from Iran became the occasion for a tough statement deploring the regime’s violence.
Of course, the conservative take on Iran has never been genuinely interested in what Iranians think or in the well-being of the Iranian people. Krauthammer, for example, showed his true colors when he yearned for a “successor regime” in Iran that would be “as moderate as pre-Khomeini Iran.” The pre-Khomeini regime was, in fact, a brutal dictatorship detested by Iranians. That’s how it got overthrown in the revolution and how Khomeini was able to ride to pwoer.
What the Shah’s Iran was, however, was a loyal proxy of the United States. But precisely what Obama has been trying to achieve through restraint is to avoid discrediting the Iranian opposition as a Shah-esque pawn of American grand strategy. Conservatives don’t have that worry because they genuinely have no interest in dealing with any version of Iran that doesn’t have a supplicant relationship with the United States.
This, in turn, reflects the larger disagreement about the U.S.-Iranian relationship that has existed for several years now. Conservatives are unwilling to accept any realistic version of Iranian nuclear policy and thus want to bomb the Iranian nuclear program into oblivion. A fierce crackdown by the Iranian authorities will doubtless boost this cause by driving home the villainous nature of Iran’s leadership. On the merits, however, this would be a foolish response. Appalling as the nature of the Iranian regime may be, the United States doesn’t operate on a general principle of “no diplomatic agreements with dictators.” And it’s by no means clear that the Iranian regime is actually any more appalling than the regimes governing China or Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Indeed, most of America’s Arab allies don’t even bother to steal elections.
As long as the political crisis lasts, it makes sense as both a strategic and a humanitarian matter to provide what limited practical assistance we can to Iranian dissidents. But if the regime wins out, we need to continue to try to conduct U.S.-Iranian relations in a practical and beneficial manner. And it’s still the case that a deal on the nuclear issue — something that would preserve Iran’s right to enrich uranium but assure the international community no weaponization will take place — would still serve the interests of both countries.
Realistically, however, the odds for a successful engagement policy now look bleak. Before the election, Obama passed a letter to the supreme leader via the Swiss Embassy attempting to explore the possibility of engagement, and there’s been no positive response. More generally, the hope for engagement was that Khameini would side with more pragmatic elements in the Iranian establishment — elements like former President Ali Rafsanjani who have now largely gone over to the opposition. It thus appears that the crushing of the opposition would also entail the crushing of the faction that might be receptive to a diplomatic agreement.
The collapse of the diplomatic option, if it comes to pass, would not change the basic reality that military strikes will be ineffective and possibly counterproductive. It’s too soon to simply assume that the opposition will be crushed and that the suppression of the opposition will kill engagement. If that scenario does come to pass, we’ll have to rely on a strategy of containment and deterrence. It’s not a particularly appealing option, but if the worst happens, it’s the best we can do.
