Kenneth Pollack, a senior fellow in foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution, served as an Iran-Iraq military analyst at the CIA from 1988-95. He was also director for Near East and South Asian Affairs, and director for Persian Gulf Affairs ,at the National Security Council during the late 1990s. He wrote the influential book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, and, more recently, The Persian Puzzle, a history of U.S.-Iranian relations and an analysis of contemporary policy options. Earlier this week he sat down with TAP staff writer Matthew Yglesias to discuss attempts to deal with Iran at the bargaining table or on the battlefield.
To start out with, what should we make of the latest deal the Iranians have struck with the Europeans?
I think that the European deal has a lot of problems with it, but that said, I think that it is a perfectly good starting point. The biggest things that are left out are: one, a firm commitment from Iran that it will cease and desist all uranium and plutonium separation activities; two, a comprehensive inspections program that can actually assure us that the Iranian are complying; and three, the threat of real sanctions in case the Iranians renege. I think we've got to have all three of those things, because Iran's history is not a good one. They have cheated, they have lied. It's really clear now they've had this program going for a long time, and we need to be much more certain. That said, one of the lessons I take away from Iraq is that it turns out that a really good inspections regime, backed up by very severe sanctions, can actually work. Before the invasion, the bulk of opinion -- and I certainly fell into this camp -- was that the inspections were not going to force Saddam [Hussein] to give up his programs. Well, they did. It was a temporary thing, but that was all we needed. And I think the European deal sets us on a course where we can eventually get there.
Is the United States going to need to sweeten the pot somewhat to try to get the Europeans to brandish more sticks?
Absolutely. There's no question that the United States is going to need to be willing to show the Europeans that if the Iranians do the right thing, we're going to be willing to reward that behavior. And I think we've got to be willing to reward that behavior because the Iranians are not going to go along with this if it's nothing but sticks. If it's nothing but sticks, the Iranians are going to say, "Screw you and the horse you rode in on."
What is it that we (and, increasingly, the Europeans) fear about a nuclear Iran?
Well, obviously everyone fears something different. You do have some Americans who fear -- as the president likes to put it -- "the worst weapons in the hands of the worst people." It's a generic "Iran supports terrorism; Iran has nuclear weapons; Iran will give nuclear weapons to terrorists." And that's definitely out there, and there are lots of smart, sensible people who do fear that. But that's not my concern. The Iranians have had [weapons of mass destruction] for at least 15 years, they've supported terrorism for at least 25, they've never put the two of them together, and I don't see them having the desire to do so with nuclear weapons.
So it's more a question of the balance of power in the region.
Right. Iran is an aggressive, anti-American country. That is how this regime defines its foreign policy. They've backed off in recent years out of fear of an American conventional military operation, and my fear is that once they've got nuclear weapons, they may convince themselves that they're immune, which would allow them to go back to the kind of aggressive anti-American foreign policy we saw in the 1990s with their efforts to destabilize [Persian] Gulf governments, the Khobar Towers, the attacks on Israel, and all that really nasty stuff that made the Middle East a very unstable place.
If we give diplomacy, sanctions, etc. our best shot and they fail, where does that leave us? Air strikes?
Let me start by saying that I think that if we get the Europeans on board, the carrot-and-stick approach has a good chance of working. I think the Iranians are much more sensitive to unilateral sanctions than they want to let on. That said, it isn't a sure thing that we'll be able to get the Europeans to go along. Under those circumstances, I think the United States will have two choices. One is to go pure containment -- make it as hard as possible for the Iranians to get nuclear weapons, continue to make them pay a price, try to get the Europeans to sanction them once they do cross the nuclear threshold to try and dampen proliferation beyond Iran. I think that there is the prospect of that. We've seen a degree of prudence from the Iranians that suggests that living with a nuclear Iran might be unpleasant, but it's probably not impossible.
The alternative is to see if we can do some kind of a counter-proliferation [i.e., targeted military strikes] option. That's going to be very difficult, but I wouldn't rule it out. Right now we've got a pretty crappy counter-proliferation option, and I think the United States ought to be trying to improve the option -- with intelligence gathering [to locate weapons facilities], with covert action if necessary, position forces in the region, laying down red lines in the region, whatever we can so that the president of the United States has more than one choice.
To what extent does the deployment in Iraq leave us overexposed to countermeasures?
It creates a vulnerability, and this is one of the big problems with the counter-proliferation option. It's one of the reasons why I'm not terribly enthusiastic about it. Right now the cost-benefit is very hard to make work. On the benefit side, we don't know a lot about Iran's nuclear program, and we're very worried that there's stuff we don't know about. So what the benefit of the strikes would be is just unclear. On the cost side, the Iranians have a wonderful terrorist capability; they'll strike back with that. Beyond that, as you point out, Iraq is a real Achilles heel at the moment. Iran has a very extensive intelligence network inside of Iraq; they could turn that network into basically an insurgency or something to wage clandestine war on us in very short order. That could make Iraq considerably worse than it already is.
The other thing that seems to be on the table is the idea put forward by Michael Ledeen and others that there are things we could do that would destabilize the Iranian government in the near term.
There are multiple different versions of this theme. I'm skeptical that we could destabilize the Iranian government in the short order because I don't think the CIA has the capability inside Iran today. I'm also skeptical that that would actually help us. It would make the regime more fearful; I'm not convinced it would actually cause the regime to collapse.
Then there's this "popular revolution" possibility. Again, I don't see the evidence that the United States standing up and saying, "We want to see a different government in Iran," would actually cause a popular revolution. [Iranian President] Mohammed Khatami came as close in 1998 and 1999, but even then the people weren't ready to take to the streets for him.
It seems to me that people on the right are much more interested in pursuing counter-proliferation or regime-change options rather than the sort of deal we talked about earlier. To what extent do you think that reflects the thinking inside the administration?
My guess -- and obviously I don't know this for a fact -- is that this is my strong sense of what's going on inside the administration. The administration believes that regime change is the only appropriate policy for Iran, especially in keeping with President Bush's weltanschauung. And I think that they're caught in a loop. Because I think they are realistic enough to recognize that our ability to effect regime change in Iran is extremely limited. So on the one hand, regime change in Iran is the only appropriate policy. But they can't do it -- but they're not willing to go beyond it. Someone else might say, "Well, this is our preferred policy, but it's not possible, so let's move on to things that we can do." But their feeling is that it's better to stand on principle than to make any kind of compromises to get a policy that I don't think they would even regard as second-best.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
