Iran is not our enemy. The regime that enriches itself while murdering, oppressing, and impoverishing ordinary Iranians; the regime that incites genocide against Israel, threatens its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and vows to bring about a “world without America” — that is our enemy. This was one of the key points driven home by a trio of extraordinary individuals gathered for a dinner in Tel Aviv last week.
At the table were Bernard Lewis, for my money the greatest living historian of the Middle East; Uri Lubrani, Israel’s envoy to Iran prior to the fall of the Shah and an advisor to leaders of the Jewish state ever since; and Meir Dagan, a retired paratrooper, commando, and general who was recruited in 2002 by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon to rebuild the Mossad as an intelligence agency “with a knife in its teeth.” (Dagan stepped down from that post in 2010 and has been increasingly outspoken ever since.) A small group of young American national-security professionals — from the Hill, the Defense Department, Homeland Security, even the D.C. police department — broke pita with them. None of the three minimizes how dire will be the consequences should Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s finger come to rest on a nuclear trigger. The Iranian president subscribes to an extremist school of Shia theology that, General Dagan explained, looks forward to an apocalyptic war that would “hasten the arrival of the Mahdi,” mankind’s ultimate savior. But he thinks Ahmadinejad and his associates are not as close as many analysts believe to acquiring a nuclear capability. “Two years to have such a weapon, in my estimation,” he said.
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If that is correct — a big if — it means we have a little time to find out whether tough measures short of military force can be effective. Dagan notes, too, that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would not end the regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons: It will only delay it by perhaps two or three years. The technology, the expertise, and the components are all too readily available. North Korea and Pakistan both have them — and both have proliferated them before.
The larger point is this: Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. It is the regime that rules Iran, more than weapons or the facilities in which they are produced, that constitutes the real problem. From that it follows that changing the regime — not destroying its hardware — is the higher goal.
Ambassador Lubrani, who predicted Iran’s 1979 revolution — when then-president Jimmy Carter, among others, saw Iran as “an island of stability” — believes regime change is a realistic goal. Indeed, he is convinced there will be another Iranian revolution and that it can come about sooner rather than later — soon enough rather than too late.
Which raises the question: Based on the analyses of the historian, the diplomat, and the spy, can a coherent strategy be constructed? Can we in the West belatedly learn, as Lubrani put it, to play chess, a game of strategy invented in Iran? I’d argue that such a strategy might begin with six specific policies.
1. Tighten the sanctions noose to maximally increase pressure on the Iranian economy. That must be done carefully: Spooking oil markets and raising the price of oil will put more money, not less, into the regime’s coffers. But sanctions can work if we focus on reducing oil revenues to Iran. European countries should impose an embargo on purchases. Other countries should drive for discounts. The fewer the buyers, the higher the discounts — and the lower Iran’s oil revenue.
1. Wasn’t the Green Revolution comprised of Iran’s small middle class and secular elites? They can be powerful because they are concentrated in Tehran and have the requisite skills to govern but doesn’t the vast majority of Iranians support the theocracy? This makes revolution harder does it not? How do the experts recommend overcoming this additional challenge?
2. Help Syria break free of Tehran sounds good but isn’t the Assad regime more like a mini Saudi Arabia, facilitating and focusing Islamist rage against Israel (thus deflecting it from the regime) but not allowing these ‘proxies’ to be an existential threat to Israel . Thus a quasi détente with Israel, sure this is far from ideal but does offer a certain level of stability. If the Assad regime falls, sure Iran loses a ‘satellite’ but Syria become much more dangerous to Israel and the West. Did the experts have an opinion here?
The Syrians regime is not like Saudi Arabia. It is closer to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Both are/were run by the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party. The Ba'athist regime in Syria is more socialist and is dominated by the Alawite minority, with much of the officer corps Alawite or Druze. 2/3 of the people are Sunni Muslims. This is similar to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where the Ba'ath party
Ba'athists are not Islamists. Ba'athism was created by a Greek Orthodox Chiristian, Michel Aflaq as a pan-Arab counter to Islamism. It is widely believed that Aflaq converted to Sunni Islam, after coming to the belief that Islam is Arab nationalism. At any rate, Syria is not an Islamist regime like the Wahhabi Saudis.
30 years ago, following a 6 year campaign of terror, the Muslim Brotherhood seized the Syrian city of Hama. Hafez Assad responded by surrounding the city with thousands of soldiers, then leveling it with artillery before sending in tanks. 10,000-40,000 people were killed. We shall see how Assad's son, the dentist, deals with the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is why elections have consequences. Obama was too busy shoving government health care down everybody's throats, and setting up his "Czars" to be bothered with capitalizing on the major opportunity he had before him with Iran in back 2009. What a disaster Barack Obama has been.
I feel so much better now. With the future of Iran, and United States Foreign Policy being planned in Tel Aviv over pita, how can we possibly go wrong?! Don't worry folks!! The attack against Iran will be completely Kosher.
You must not have read 1-5. Only in 4 does he indicate using the threat of force to disquiet the mullahs. Overall, the policy suggested is Trumanesque: Speak softly and carry a big-stick.
Further, this is probably more thought than Obumbles and state have given to the problem.
It's too bad you don't have a sense of humor. Do you take everything everyone says literally? Can't you tell the difference between serious comments or someone just joking around? Have a nice day Mr. Sour Puss.
We are so concerned about an Iranian EMP attack using a nuke in the atmosphere, which would fry our electrical grid.
Well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Why don't we do it to them? Why doesn't Israel? Then claim it was a test by the Iranians themselves.
It would be the ultimate sanctions program. It might even provide the revolutionary forces with the chaos they need to strike.
I dunno. We in the US and Israel have been afraid that Iran is "just around the corner" from a nuclear weapon for the better part of two decades. See: External Link Living in a perpetual state of impending apocalyptic doom-- as Dagan views Ahmadinijad-- is not really a great recipe for a cool, rational calculation of costs and benefits of various policy options. The Iranian regime is a terrible autocracy, for sure. But that doesn't mean that Iranians want to be liberated by us, either. In fact, the general sense of Iranian protestors was that they *didn't* want US action.
Let's take great care that we know what Iran is really doing, and be very conscious of the positives and negatives of our policy options. We haven't always done that in the past decade or so.
The premise that Iranians yearn to breathe free and by and large resent their autocracy is true. The question is, what is the best way to get from here to there? We can't just insert ourselves into Iranian domestic politics out of a fantasy that we are the saviors of the world. Even assuming benevolence, we're not omnipotent nor omniscient. That applies to economic regulations, and it applies to foreign relations.
It is worth noting that Dagan is a man of the Israeli Left, and what May describes as "increasingly outspoken" appears in the context of Israeli tradition as an astonishing, polticially-motivated breach of trust in a former head of the Mossad. They don't talk, and shouldn't. Dagan has, and continues to.
Lubrani is another creature of the Israeli covert netherworld. His business dealings in Africa ought to be of interest to anybody citing him as a credible reference. One doesn't believe or disbelieve anything Uri Lubrani says, one simply tries to figure out what he's trying to achieve.
I like and respect Mr. May, but I'm afraid I have to say he got played by those two.
Lubrani's experience in Iran speaks for itself. Read the intro chapters in Bergman's "The Secret War With Iran", which describe the last days of the Shah's reign, including Lubrani's role.
According to numerous polls over the last decade, there are two things that most Iranians support, no matter how moderate or extream they may be. They want to aquire nuclear weapons to bring back Irans former greatness, and to destroy Israel. The last Shahs father renamed Persia Iran to honor the Nazis anti semitism. Regretibly, we fight them pre nuc or they become nuc.
Normally I only take foreign policy advice from people who know how to spell extreme.
Most Iranians who are not afraid for their lives want peace and prosperity for Iran, and freedom to have nuclear weapons if they want.
I agree with the author. The regime is the problem because they talk about destroying other countries.
And if your standard of judgment requires a lack of racism you'll be hard pressed to defend your own country's historical record.
If you knew more than Anglocentric WWII history you would know that Cyrus saved the Jews from the Babylonians and that the Magi were Persian Zoarastrians.
But I agree, Persia is a much more beautiful and fitting name.
We need to get away from this "the regime is our enemy, not the people" nonsense. If the people cannot overthrow the regime, then they are guilty of supporting it in inverse proportion to their failed efforts to overthrow it. If the people don't revolt, then they are very quilty of the regime's crimes. If they try hard to revolt and fail due to the regime's repression then little guilt is incurred, with the concomitant result that the people will know for sure we are on their side shoud we escalate the war that began in 1979.
The fact of the matter is that all regimes govern with the consent of the governed.
Polities differ with regard to the manner in which this consent is given, but no regime survives a population's will to remove it regardless of the cost.
The Germans were accountable for the Third Reich, and the Iranians are accountable for the Islamic Republic.
We should hold other peoples to the same standard our society met when the Founders pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Our recent practice of targeting regimes rather than nations simply teaches the nations that there are limited costs to allowing rogues to govern them. It has to become more painful for the population at large if their calculations are to change.
Actually, it began in 1953, a fact that is generally lost on the American public. The U.S. engineered a coup against Mossadegh, who had successfully wrested political power, including control of the military, away from the despotic Shah. Our interference put the Shah firmly back in control for several more decades, a fact not lost on the revolutionaries of 1979.
With that bit of perspective in mind, it would behoove us to stop demonizing the Iranians - nation or regime - and adopt some sort of rational policy toward them.
It doesn't seem to have dawned on the Cold Warriors and their ideological children that these policies of isolation and confrontation did nothing but strengthen the radicals in the countries we target. Our hard lines toward North Korea, Cuba, and Iran have been spectacular failures (at least by the standards of the public intent of those policies). The Kims, Castro, Khomeini - all served to the end of their lives, all were succeeded by successors of their choosing, not ours - all our posturing and sanctions and attempts at isolation did nothing but solidify them in their positions. At what point do we actually observe the effects of these policies and try a different course?
With the exception of supporting Iran's dissidents, these points are merely more of the same donothingism.
By the way, it's important to be aware that the following is grossly misleading:
"Iran’s anti-regime opposition also deserves moral support and material assistance. That should have begun in 2009 when, in the wake of blatantly fraudulent elections, mass protests broke out with demonstrators chanting: 'Obama! Are you with us or against us?' "
Oh, please. The Bush administration's absolute failure to support opposition in Iran was widely-recognized and decried. It is important to be aware that this was deliberate, not a mistake or an abberation; from NoKo to the Middle East to South America, the Bush administration caved and catered to our enemies.
Good luck with the likilihood of implementing any of your ideas. What is obvious to me is that there is no capable or farsighted leadership anywhere in the western world. Simply look at President Obama and the spot of bother that the EU finds itself in. I rest my case!
