Throughout a record-length presidential campaign, Barack Obama -- first in the primaries, and then in the general election -- stood firmly behind his view that the United States of America needs to make a serious effort at good-faith negotiations with Iran in order to resolve the dispute over Iran's nuclear activities and help stabilize the region. Now with the attempt to put that agenda in practice just barely beginning, efforts are already underway to quietly kill it. Consider a letter sent this weekend by a powerful group of House Democrats -- Steny Hoyer, Howard Berman, Ike Skelton, Silvestre Reyes, Henry Waxman, Gary Ackerman, and Robert Wexler. Any engagement, they argue, should come only with the agreement that Iran "must verifiably suspend its uranium enrichment program within at most a few months of the initiation of the discussions."
While this would be nice, it's not a realistic outcome. It's far from clear that the United States could get Iran to eschew uranium enrichment as the conclusion of a negotiation. After all, as the Iranians will point out, international treaties don't prohibit uranium enrichment, only actual weaponization of nuclear materials. More important, debates over the Iranian nuclear program are only one aspect of the complicated U.S.-Iranian bilateral relationship. Issues from the Mossadegh coup, to the hostage taking, to the downing of an Iranian airliner, to the Khobar Towers bombing, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and beyond are important elements of the suspicion between Teheran and Washington. It's wrong to say that progress can't be made on the nuclear front unless all other disputes between the U.S. and Iran are resolved, but the scope of the diplomatic issues at hand does mean that successful talks would likely take a long time.
Probably not coincidentally, the idea of putting a brief timeline on diplomatic talks was one of the so-called demands the Israeli government presented to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in early March.
Similarly, on March 31, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that "neither [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu nor his principal military advisers would suggest a deadline for American progress on the Iran nuclear program, though one aide said pointedly that Israeli time lines are now drawn in months, 'not years.'" And in his April 1 congressional testimony, Gen. David Petraeus said that "the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it."
The Hoyer group proposes that if the Iranians don't drop enrichment within a few months, the United States should shift to a program of punitive sanctions. Netanyahu also talks up Western sanctions but goes further and says Israel will attack Iranian nuclear facilities. According to Goldberg, "These same military advisers told me that they believe Iran's defenses remain penetrable, and that Israel would not necessarily need American approval to launch an attack." In a technical sense, it may be true that Israel could launch an attack without American approval. But to do so, it would need to fly through Iraqi airspace -- airspace currently controlled by the U.S. military. Under the circumstances, any Israeli attack would be read around the world as undertaken with American blessing.
Bombing Iran was a bad idea in the spring of 2006 and it remains a bad idea today.
A preventive military attack, whether by the United States or Israel, will only partially damage the Iranian nuclear program and further convince the Iranian population and leadership of the desirability of nuclear weapons. If an attack leads Iran to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and remove its nuclear activities from supervision while increasing funding for the program, both of which are realistic possible consequences of an attack, it may even hasten the arrival of an Iranian nuclear weapon. Even if it delays it, the delay won't be especially substantial. And then we'll be confronted with the need to implement a policy of deterrence under circumstances where we and the Israelis, rather than the Iranians, are viewed as the rogues.
These fundamental problems with a "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" policy have been well known for years, but advocates of military action simply refuse to deal with them. Last week, for example, Elliot Abrams, a Bush-era National Security Council senior director and a Reagan-era Iran-Contra crook, who is now ensconced at the Council on Foreign Relations, blithely assured us that the Iranian population would react to airstrikes with anger at their government for provoking the strikes rather than at the country that did the bombing. Proponents of airstrikes in a variety of contexts have spent decades selling this story; it's never been true before, and there's no reason to think it would be true if tried in Iran.
The simple fact of the matter is that there's nothing we can do if the Iranians are genuinely hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon. If they are, they'll get one sooner or later, and we'll have to shift to deterring them and taking actions to dissuade other countries from following suit.
But there's a real chance that diplomacy could work. The Iranians have much to gain, potentially, from improved relations with the United States. And were U.S.-Iranian relations to improve, much of Tehran's rationale for wanting nuclear weapons would vanish. Such a rapprochement would be good for Iran, good for the United States, good for Israel, and good for everyone else. It's something we ought to try for; we ought to try for it in good faith, and we ought to try for it either as long as it takes or until the Iranians plainly say they're not interested and go build a nuclear weapon. Curtailing talks with artificial deadlines will be counterproductive, and an Israeli military attack would be extremely counterproductive. The Israeli government ought to realize that but apparently doesn't. Thus, the Obama administration is going to have to lean heavily on Israeli leaders to make them see that their best hope of a non-nuclear Iran is to give Obama the time he needs to negotiate.
