Thomas R. Mattair
Dr. Mattair is executive director of the Middle East Policy Council, associate editor of Middle East Policy, and author of Global Security Watch: Iran: A Reference Handbook. This article is an updated version of the Richard H. Foster Lecture at the Thirty-Ninth Frank Church International Affairs Symposium at Idaho State University, given on March 5, 2010.
First, let me state that I am not a fan of the current Iranian regime. I do not want this regime to acquire nuclear weapons, to be a dominant power in the Middle East, or to crush the Green Movement. But I also want to avoid another costly war, and I think sanctions are not going to be terribly effective in changing the regime’s behavior. That leaves diplomacy and containment.
The Year of Iran?
It has been said that 2010 is going to be “the year of Iran,” that Iran will be the most important foreign-policy issue on the agenda of the United States and its allies and friends, particularly because Iran did not accept U.S. terms for a nuclear agreement by the U.S. deadline of the end of 2009.
Why should this be the “year of Iran?” Iran does not have nuclear weapons and will almost certainly not have any by the end of the year. U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Iran will not have nuclear weapons before 2013 to 2015, if then. The head of Israel’s Mossad agrees that Iran will not have these weapons for several years. Iran has not mounted any serious challenge to the United States in Afghanistan, although there has been some low level support to the Talban, according to Secretary of Defense Gates, and Iran has in fact demonstrated some willingness to cooperate with the United States in Afghanistan, as when it helped rout the Taliban in 2001 and helped set up the new Afghan government and pressed for democratic elections there. Iran challenged us with covert military actions in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, when it seemed we might use Iraq as a platform for attacking Iran. But this had subsided by 2008, according to our own military commanders. Iran has also cooperated at times and could continue to do so, although Iran clearly tried to influence the election in Iraq and the post-election deliberations on forming a government by supporting Shia religious parties. Iran is not the reason for the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and Iran could not stop its success even if it wanted to do so. Iran does not control Hamas or Hezbollah, although it does support them. Iran cannot become the dominant power in the Gulf region, despite its aspiration to play that role.
Perhaps this will be the year of Iran because there will be military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. It is doubtful that the United States or Israel would do something that ill-advised this year, but it is not impossible. Certainly there are advocates of military strikes this year, and they are some of the same people who advocated the disastrous war in Iraq. But Defense Secretary Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen and National Security Adviser Jones are against it, and Israel’s former top general, an air force commander, has said he does not think Israel has the capability to do it. Perhaps it will be the year of Iran because more sanctions will be imposed on Iran. Again, there are legions of advocates for this, but new sanctions will be of limited or no utility in persuading Iran to change its foreign-policy behavior, just as previous sanctions have been.
Some think this will be the year of Iran because there will be momentous changes in Iran’s domestic politics. There has been a serious crisis in Iran ever since the June 2009 election results were announced and hundreds of thousands of Iranians poured into the streets in protest. They understandably believed that President Ahmadinejad was getting a second term only because of massive fraud and were outraged when the regime then reacted with violence and repression, with killings, jailings, human rights abuses, show trials, forced confessions and myriad forms of censorship. This violence and repression have targeted very important and pragmatic leaders of the political elite who participated in the revolution of 1978-79 to overthrow the shah and who governed Iran in the following decades. Those U.S. officials who argued in the 1990s that there was no real difference between Iranian hard-liners and Iranian pragmatists should now realize that they were wrong.
The tenacity of the Green Movement’s protests to the regime in the face of abuse from June 2009 to February 2010 was very impressive. It was reasonable to hope that it would result in some compromise by a worried regime, but it seems now that it will not; the regime has become increasingly authoritarian and rigid. Former President Rafsanjani, former Prime Minister Moussavi, and former Speaker of the Majlis Karroubi all proposed compromises, but Supreme Leader Khamenei has not taken them up. It does not seem to me that the regime can be changed in the near term, or even in the medium term, as long as Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij paramilitary and riot police and the plainclothes officers have the weapons, the jails, the courts, the intelligence apparatus and the mass-communications systems at their disposal. The most important recent opportunity for the Green Movement to assert itself was on February 11, the day that commemorates the 1979 revolution, but the regime effectively used all of its assets to keep the protests small and scattered and brief. International Labor Day on May 1 was another opportunity for major protests, but it was also foiled by the regime. This does not bode well for planned protests on the June 12 anniversary of last year’s election. Certainly Iran has a history of popular protests that have cancelled a foreign economic monopoly in the 1890s, and won a constitution in 1906, and overthrown a shah in 1979, and this movement may eventually succeed. However, the regime also has a measure of popular support — hard to measure, but it is there.
It also does not appear that this will be the year of Iran because of any diplomatic breakthrough, but here I want to be wrong. In 2009, President Obama was eloquent in his speeches reaching out to Iran’s people and leaders, and he also wrote two letters to Khamenei. He did not get the kind of open-minded reaction he deserved from the Iranian regime, but the administration was also slow to actually engage Iran in face-to-face meetings. It renewed existing sanctions and even toughened them and threatened more at the same time as it called for diplomacy. It wisely indicated that it was prepared to negotiate with the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad government even after the dubious election results in June, but in my opinion it has been unnecessarily inflexible in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program since serious discussions began in October 2009.
Perhaps this will be the year of Iran because the Iran problem will be poorly analyzed and even deliberately mischaracterized and exaggerated beyond any previous level. There has already been a high level of this over the last two decades.
Iran’s Nuclear Program
In 1992, for example, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres warned that Iran was not only seeking nuclear weapons, but would have them by the end of the decade and would pose an extremely dangerous threat to the West. In 1995, I attended a small meeting in Washington at which both Foreign Minister Peres and Ehud Barak, who would later become Israel’s prime minister, were speakers. Both of them told the audience that Iran would have nuclear weapons within two to three years, i.e., by 1997 or 1998. They were wrong. Israelis told the new Obama administration early in 2009 that Iran would have everything it needed for a nuclear weapon by the end of 2009. They were also wrong. Everyone who has predicted Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons since the early 1990s has been wrong. But people continue to do it. Someday it may very well be true. After 18 years of being wrong about Iran’s progress, 18 years of imposing increasingly tough economic sanctions on Iran, more than 18 years of both the United States and Iran blowing opportunities for constructive engagement and diplomatic agreements, and quite a few years of threatening Iran with military strikes — particularly from 2006 through 2008, and now again in 2010 — we may finally learn that Iran has mastered the technology and produced every necessary element of a nuclear weapon.
Elementary international relations theory tells us that this would be a common reaction to what Iran sees in its environment. Russia to the north, China to the east, Pakistan and India to the southeast, the United States to the south, and Israel to the west, all have nuclear weapons. Iran is encircled by nuclear powers. Moreover, until the 1990s, Iraq to the west was developing nuclear weapons. For Iran to use nuclear weapons in a first strike would certainly guarantee a retaliatory second strike that could, as Hillary Clinton said during the presidential campaign in 2008, “obliterate” Iran. Israeli Defense Minister Barak told a Washington Institute for Near East Policy audience in March 2010 that Iran was not likely to attack Israel with nuclear weapons because, while Iran is ruled by radicals, it is not ruled by crazy people. But if Iran has nuclear weapons, adversaries would be deterred from a first strike against Iran. Some are concerned that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would enable it to be dominant in the region or at least more assertive. This is the concern of GCC leaders, but U.S. and Israeli nuclear weapons would check Iran, and there are Arab states that could acquire them quickly, thus further checking Iran in the Gulf. This would not necessarily be destabilizing; it would require everyone to act with more restraint. There are officials in the Obama administration who think Iran could be contained if it acquired nuclear weapons. But our intelligence agencies are not convinced that Iran’s leaders have made a political decision to develop nuclear weapons. They also think that Iran engages in rational cost-benefit analysis and can be persuaded to forsake a path to nuclear weapons with diplomacy and sanctions — and, I would add, with incentives. This is what director of national intelligence Blair has said.
Pakistan’s nuclear proliferator A.Q. Khan has reportedly said that Iran’s Defense Minister Shamkani sought nuclear weapons from Pakistan in 1987. This was seven years into the Iran-Iraq War, when Iraq was increasing its missile attacks against Iranian cities. Iran was given some centrifuge parts and a document explaining how to shape enriched uranium for a bomb. It is clear that Iran engaged in secret nuclear activities in the 1990s, namely, importing uranium yellowcake and designs for a conversion facility to turn the yellow-cake into uranium hexafluoride (UF6), and also importing uranium hexafluoride and centrifuges to turn this into low enriched uranium (LEU). All this was a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Safeguards Agreement between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran.
It is not entirely clear whether all this secrecy was to protect a civilian program or an eventual weapons program. The authors of an article called “After Iran Gets the Bomb” in the March/April 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs argue that this was largely a defensive military program carried out by moderate Iranian governments to develop a deterrent against a range of possible foes. If this is true, and it seems logical, then it may not have been necessary to present it as a great short- or medium-term danger and to impose punitive economic sanctions through Executive Orders and congressional legislation and to isolate Iran politically. Perhaps all this has helped drive Iran to where it is today. Perhaps the Europeans were right that the “critical dialogue” could have been fruitful, but that would have required U.S. participation. During this time, Iran also secretly constructed a uranium-enrichment facility in Natanz and a heavy-water plant in Arak, which were not discovered until 2002. U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Iran also did some research and experimentation on nuclear warheads before 2003 but stopped at that point. Some of the evidence pointing to this is from documents of dubious authenticity — which should remind us that some of the evidence in 2002 pointing to Iraqi nuclear weapons were blatant forgeries — but enough of the evidence concerning Iran also comes from communications intercepts (and probably defectors) that seem more reliable. Iran may have wanted to have the capability to make the political decision to weaponize if necessary, to have a “breakout” capacity. But, again, according to U.S. intelligence, they stopped this work and they have not necessarily made this political decision. There have been rumors for months that the U.S. intelligence community is about to release a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) overturning the conclusion of their November 2007 NIE — that Iran suspended work on weaponization in 2003 — but so far the new NIE has not been issued and it will reportedly be classified in any case. Israel and several European states believe that Iran continued this work after 2003, and the February 2010 IAEA report also suggests that Iran may have continued this work after 2004.
Iran has openly been enriching uranium to 3.5 percent, sufficient to fuel a civilian nuclear reactor, but the latest IAEA reports tell us that Iran is producing less enriched uranium than previously, that fewer of its centrifuges are spinning, and that all of this material has been under IAEA containment and surveillance and has not been diverted to military purposes. That may be because Iran made a political decision to slow down, but it is also very likely because the United States and friends have successfully sabotaged Iran’s program. Iran announced in February 2010 that it had begun enriching uranium to 19.75 percent purity to fuel the Tehran Research Reactor, in order to produce molybdenum-99 isotopes for cancer research and diagnosis. The IAEA quickly confirmed that Iran had succeeded in producing at least a small amount, and Iran announced in April that it had produced eleven pounds of 19.75 percent enriched uranium. Iran has been doing this on a small scale at its Natanz Pilot Fuel Enrichment Facility, using only one cascade of centrifuges, which could theoretically produce enough fuel for the medical purpose. Iran also has a facility for fabricating fuel assemblies, but it is not clear that they can actually do that yet. Now that Iran is indeed enriching to 19.75 percent, it is not a great technological hurdle to enrich to 90 percent, which is what is needed to fuel a nuclear weapon. However, it would take time to do this — one year, according to U.S. intelligence officials. This is not doomsday yet. In April, Iran announced that it would permit more IAEA inspections and reconfigurations of monitoring cameras at the facility where this is being done, and this should provide better assurance that Iran is not diverting this material in order to enrich it into 90 percent weapons-grade fuel (HEU), but IAEA chief Amana said in early May they had not done it yet. Certainly it would be better to fashion a diplomatic agreement whereby Iran can import fuel rods/plates with this 19.75 percent enriched uranium and not need to produce it itself. It is not clear that diplomacy needs to be considered dead in the water on this matter.
Let’s recall that in May 2003, Iran proposed a “grand bargain,” a negotiation aimed at resolving all outstanding issues, including its nuclear programs; its relations with Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah; its policy toward Israel; the stability of Iraq; and al-Qaeda. Iran suggested that it could accept the 2002 Saudi Arabian proposal for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This was smart of them, as they knew they could be next after Iraq. In fact, they specifically asked in their proposal for security assurances as well as an end to sanctions. The Bush administration rejected the proposal, largely because they still thought Iraq would be a cakewalk and serve as a platform for overthrowing the Iranian regime, or at least for winning greater concessions from Iran. That was more important to them than using the considerable leverage they already had to try to solve our problems diplomatically. Iran also voluntarily suspended the enrichment of uranium from late 2003 until early 2006 while waiting for the EU-3 (England, France, Germany and the European Union foreign minister) to present a promised package of incentives (although Iran did not suspend all related activities, such as the conversion of uranium, the testing of centrifuges, etc.). When the package of incentives turned out to be too little, Iran resumed its small-scale enrichment testing at its Natanz research facility in February 2006 and then started industrial-scale enrichment at Natanz in February 2007. Iran also made other agreements with the IAEA for enhanced safeguards and more intense inspections in 2003 and then refused to implement them when sanctioned by the UN Security Council in December 2006 and afterward. Iran has made considerable technical progress since then, moving from very small-scale production of LEU to large-scale industrial-level production of LEU and now, unfortunately, to 19.75 percent. A willingness to negotiate the “grand bargain” proposal in 2003 or a better package of incentives in late 2005 could have forestalled this.
It should also be noted that Iran offered in 2009 to buy the 19.75 percent enriched fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor rather than do the enrichment itself. The United States, France, Russia and the IAEA responded with a proposal that Iran turn over about 70 percent of its LEU in one batch and then wait about a year to receive the enriched fuel rods/plates for the Tehran Research Reactor. Iran thought, not without reason, that if they shipped out their LEU they might never see the fuel rods/plates. The idea behind this proposal was that Iran would not have the necessary stockpile of LEU to enrich to the HEU necessary for a nuclear weapon during this year. Oddly enough though, at that time the Obama administration was questioning whether Iran had the technical capability to enrich even to 19.75 percent, much less 90 percent. Moreover, note that the IAEA has regularly reported that Iran’s LEU is monitored and that none of it has been diverted for any possible enrichment to HEU. Furthermore, LEU could only be enriched into HEU if Iran’s centrifuges at Natanz were reconfigured. This would take time and would be noticed by the IAEA, which does many surprise inspections, on short-notice. Another way would be if Iran had a secret facility where this could be done. The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Facility near Qom, revealed in September after U.S. satellites had watched it being built for five years, was designed to accommodate only about 3,000 centrifuges, leading some analysts to think it was designed to produce HEU secretly. But that would also depend on a secret supply of LEU, which would in turn depend on a secret conversion facility to supply enough uranium hexafluoride feedstock for the centrifuges to produce LEU. It would probably also require advanced models of centrifuges. Iran has done limited tests of its second-generation centrifuges at its Natanz research plant. Iran has also said that it has not tested its third-generation centrifuges with UF6, and until this is done, Iran cannot know what design changes may be necessary for mass production. The Fordow facility was and still is in the early stages of construction and could not serve that purpose for well over a year, but it has now also been inspected and will continue to be. Depriving Iran of so much of its LEU in one fell swoop does not seem to have been absolutely necessary. Iran’s counteroffers — for example, to turn over smaller batches of its LEU in exchange for 19.75-percent-enriched fuel rods/plates for the Tehran Research Reactor, have been characterized as rejections of the offer by the United States and its partners. Furthermore, the Obama administration did not meet face to face with Iran to discuss any counteroffer, relying instead on the IAEA as an intermediary to convey messages back and forth. A compromise would have been a much better deal than Iran’s producing its own, which is what we are faced with now, and then mastering the technology to enrich to 90 percent, which we may be faced with in the future.
In mid-May, as this article was going to press, Brazil and Turkey elicited an agreement from Iran that it would ship to Turkey the same amount of LEU proposed in 2009 and then wait for the 19.75 percent enriched fuel assemblies. But after additional months of enrichment, this only represented 50 percent of Iran’s LEU. The United States now considers this unacceptable, noting that Iran would continue enriching to 19.75 percent, and arguing that Iran would retain enough LEU for one bomb, again dismissing the fact that this LEU is under IAEA containment and surveillance. The Obama administration announced that it would continue to press for UNSC sanctions. Our inflexibility has not paid off in the past and probably will not pay off now.
U.S. Policy Choices
A year ago, before Iran’s June election, I argued at a Middle East Policy Council conference on Capitol Hill that it was worth the effort to see if “win-win” diplomatic agreements on all outstanding issues, including the nuclear one, could be negotiated with Iran. There were some prominent analysts who thought the Obama administration should not begin this effort with the Ahmadinejad government because it might benefit him in the upcoming election and because we might get a more flexible government out of that election. Since then, there has been some concern that this effort would lend legitimacy to a regime that has resorted to brute force against its opponents and that this effort could subvert the Green Movement’s prospects for bringing about positive change. But will sanctions or war help Iran’s opposition?
Some have argued that the Green Movement is so strong and the regime so fractured that military strikes and/or economic sanctions will topple it. Some of these same people believed Ahmad Chalabi that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be welcomed by the people and produce a pro-Israeli democracy. Again, this rosy scenario is dubious. It is not at all clear what would follow from a breakdown of authority, as the Green Movement is itself fragmented, with many seeking reform within the system and others seeking a regime change. Who are the leaders who seek regime change, and what do they want to put in its place? We don’t really know. We do know that the regime that emerged in Iraq is not what we wanted. And we know that the Green Movement has been stymied by the regime since February 2010.
The congressional legislation that may find its way to the president’s desk would reduce somewhat Iran’s access to refined petroleum products, such as gasoline, by imposing sanctions on firms that sell, finance, insure and ship these products to Iran. But it would also make it easier for the regime to justify removing domestic subsidies on these and other products and to pin the blame for higher prices on the United States rather than on its own economic and political mistakes. Iran’s people, including those who are part of the Green Movement, would pay more for less. Moreover, it is very common to claim that Iran depends on foreign imports for 40 percent of its consumption of refined petroleum products, but it is actually less than 30 percent. Measuring Iran’s imports alone is a mistake; Iran also uses imports to build stockpiles for future emergencies and also exports its own refined petroleum products, for example, to Iraq. The regime, which has stockpiled months of refined petroleum products, and which has expanded Iran’s domestic refining capacity, and which can openly import and secretly smuggle refined petroleum products into Iran from many willing suppliers, will make a lot of money.
A number of European firms have stopped supplying Iran, but that does not include Total. The Indian firm Reliance has reportedly stopped, but it has a history of stopping and starting again. There are many other willing suppliers in Central Asia, India, the Gulf and South America. The leaders of Iran’s opposition, the ones we want to help, oppose more sanctions like these, saying they will just hurt the population. Moussavi has clearly said so.
Looking at it from another angle, the sanctions that have been in place since 1995 and that Congress seeks to have more vigorously enforced now through new legislation have resulted in American and European and Japanese firms losing a tremendous amount of business from the development of Iran’s oil and natural gas resources. This also means lost employment, wages, dividends and tax revenues. We have lost this to Chinese, Russian, Indian, Malaysian and Brazilian firms. Conoco lost the opportunity to develop Iran’s offshore gas fields in 1995. Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Japan’s INPEX are losing the opportunities to develop new on-shore and off-shore oil and gas fields in Iran, while the Chinese National Petroleum Company and Russia’s Gazprom and others are taking them. New sanctions will mean that European firms in particular will lose out and that Europe will be deprived of the Iranian natural gas that could reduce Europe’s dependence on Russia. It seems that we are maneuvering ourselves and now our economic partners out of a very important country and turning it over to our competitors.
The new sanctions that were reportedly favored by our executive branch until recently were called “smarter sanctions” because they would target individual Revolutionary Guard officers and their companies and the banks they do business with. However, these Revolutionary Guard companies control key sectors of the economy, so the people would also be hit, including those who want reform. For example, U.S. executive orders issued in 2001 and 2005 targeting Iranian firms suspected of involvement in nuclear and missile proliferation and terrorism have included sanctions on Khatam ol-Anbia, a giant engineering and construction firm owned by the Revolutionary Guard. Four of its subsidiaries were added to the blacklist in February 2010. But this firm also has contracts to develop Iran’s oil and gas fields and pipelines, as well as its dams, roads and other civilian infrastructure. It also subcontracts with private Iranian firms that employ civilians. These sanctions have also targeted major European banks, and some of them have had to pay fines of hundreds of millions of dollars for doing business with Iran. The Revolutionary Guard general who heads Khatam ol-Anbia says this has hurt, but the company can and does turn to the Iranian government for the funds it needs. The government can take it from its foreign-exchange reserves, which are very large, perhaps $90 billion, because no sanctions yet imposed punish anyone except American companies for importing and paying for Iranian oil, selling for the healthy price of $86 per barrel in April. Iranian companies can and do also raise funds through international bond offerings. Even so, the sanctions that the United States is proposing to the UNSC are not just limited, smart sanctions. They reportedly include inspections of ships bound to and from Iran.
The threatened military strikes against Iran’s known nuclear facilities would, if actually carried out, probably enable the regime to change the subject from its own repression and mismanagement to the behavior of the West, rally more public support for the regime, and justify even more repression of the opposition, portrayed as a tool of the West anyway. It would also probably kill a lot of Iranians, something that never endears the bombers to the bombed. The leaders of Iran’s opposition — again, the ones we are trying to help — oppose military strikes. And again, to look at it from another angle, these strikes might only set Iran’s nuclear programs back a few years. First, Israel does not have conventional bunker-busting weapons that would destroy facilities buried under layers of steel and concrete or tunneled into mountainsides. Its aircraft would have trouble getting to Iran and returning home. Israel could rely on ballistic missiles or submarine-launched cruise missiles, but they do not carry a heavy enough payload to do the job, unless Israel used so-called low-radiation tactical nuclear warheads. Israel’s former top general, air force commander Dan Halutz, recently said he does not think Israel has the capability to strike Iran alone. The United States is producing conventional bunker busting weapons that would be more effective, but they cannot kill the technical knowledge of Iranian scientists or the political will of Iran’s leaders.
Moreover, if we do not know the location of all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, as some of the advocates of military strikes acknowledge, how can we target them? Would Iran not use its aircraft and surfaceto-air defensive missile systems to stop this? Would the United States not target those defensive systems? And would this not lead to an obvious but unpredictable escalation of the strikes? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to call this war instead of strikes? “Strikes,” whatever that means, would lead at the very least to covert Iranian retaliation against any GCC country that provided airspace or any facility for the strike, which is why so many GCC leaders have said they don’t want this issue resolved through force. So has the Iraqi regime. Strikes would at the very least raise the insurance rates for any ship entering the Gulf to transport oil and gas and would raise the price of oil and gas for everyone in the world. It could lead to sabotage of GCC oil and gas fields, processing facilities, pipelines and shipping lanes, interrupting the flow of energy supplies out of the Gulf to consumers worldwide. It might also lead to Iranian efforts to kill U.S. forces attempting to withdraw from Iraq or stabilize Afghanistan. Iran does have the capability to do that. The Obama administration rightly wants to avoid this. It is trying to persuade China that it can best avoid such a scenario by agreeing to more sanctions. It is also trying to get more sanctions to assure Israel that it does not need to rush to military strikes. It is also arguing more sanctions will lead Iran back to the negotiating table.
This leaves diplomacy. A year ago, when I spoke on Capitol Hill and outlined what I thought were a series of “win-win” negotiations for the United States and Iran, I did not predict that negotiations would be successful. I just argued that we should try. I still think that the United States and even this current Iranian regime could see mutual advantages at the global, regional and domestic levels in agreements regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Arab-Israeli issues. These could be very beneficial for Iran’s neighbors as well. You can read the text at www.mepc.org, so I will only abbreviate it here. In Afghanistan, both the United States and Iran could benefit from the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the establishment of an Afghan government that can provide security and deny the Taliban and al-Qaeda a safe haven and drug profits. In Iraq, both the United States and Iran could benefit from the withdrawal of U.S. forces and the establishment of an Iraqi government that is broadly representative of all its sectarian and ethnic communities so that the country does not descend into civil war again. In the Gulf, both the United States and Iran could benefit from some reduction of U.S. forces and an understanding about the legitimate conventional military needs of Iran and the GCC states, maritime boundaries, oil and gas fields, and incidents at sea.
The United States can protect its Arab friends in the Gulf with a smaller force, augmented by an over-the-horizon rapid deployment force and the provision of arms, military assistance and security guarantees to our friends. It does not necessarily need a heavy military footprint inside the Gulf. Certainly Iran cannot have everything it wants there, namely, the complete withdrawal of the U.S. military and the abrogation of security agreements with the GCC states. The United States is not going to do this, but some reduction of U.S. forces could alleviate Iranian concerns enough to elicit concessions. In fact, security assurances to Iran that it will not be attacked is probably a sine qua non for Iranian agreement to the really intrusive IAEA inspections that would alleviate our concern about their nuclear programs. Without those security assurances, Iran does not have much incentive to compromise.
In my opinion, however, it will be difficult for the United States to offer security assurances to Iran as long as the Islamic Republic is an adversary of Israel and is supporting resistance by Hezbollah and Hamas. Even if Iran bulldozed its own nuclear programs, the United States would still stress its role in Arab-Israeli affairs as a reason to pressure and isolate Iran. But it will be difficult for Iran to change its behavior as long as there is no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So, in addition to being the right thing to do on its own merits, fostering a two-state solution is also a way to deprive Iran of a grievance and to challenge Iran to accept what the Arabs accept. Iran does not live in a vacuum; it lives in an environment. If we don’t create a better environment, we will not likely get more acceptable Iranian behavior.
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