Iran — VOICES for REASON

Thursday marks the 31st anniversary of the coalescing of Iran’s Islamist revolution. But on this deeply symbolic day, which Tehran usually spends glorifying its militant, tyrannical rule, millions of Iranian citizens will likely attempt another show of mass defiance and repudiation of the regime.

That’s precisely what Tehran fears. It fears having its veneer of popular endorsement torn away altogether. Witness its preemptive crack down. Critics and student activists have been rounded up and tossed in prison. Earlier this month, to build up the intimidation factor, the regime began executing dissidents. The IranTracker project is compiling a record of Tehran’s intimidation tactics in the run-up to the day. The list is horrifyingly long.

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Over at AEI’s blog, Danielle Pletka detects signs that the Obama administration is changing its approach toward Iran. After getting nowhere with attempts to lure Iran into negotiations, suddenly “the administration has started pouring it on from all spigots: sending Patriot batteries to Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait, lengthening deployments to the Gulf, and otherwise talking up the stakes. So what’s the deal? Is Iran a major threat to the United States and our allies? Did this suddenly dawn on the administration?  . . . Hint: Something has changed. Second hint: It’s not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. About time too.”

Allow me to register a dissenting perspective.

Obama’s so-called diplomatic outreach has treated Iran as a morally worthy interlocutor and estranged friend, whose goodwill it is our duty to cultivate. And that entire initiative is predicated on evading Iran’s bloody record and militant ideal of global Islamist rule. It’s a long way to go from that to a clear-eyed recognition of the regime’s character.  Obama would have to do, and publicly say, a lot more to convince me — let alone convince Tehran — that the administration now views the regime as fundamentally hostile and is willing to use military force to eliminate the threat it poses. Everything our president has done since taking office has reinforced the contrary view.

stock.xchg/g-point

The Afghan government floated a new plan “offering jobs, security, education and other social benefits to Taliban followers who defect” in the hope of quelling, if not crippling, the Taliban-Islamist resurgence seeking to take over the country. The Islamist response? A massive, coordinated suicide attack on the presidential palace, ministry of justice and central bank in Kabul.

It was meant to deliver a message — which the Taliban’s spokesman put into words afterward: “We are ready to fight, and we have the strength to fight, and nobody from the Taliban side is ready to make any kind of deal.”

Horrific scarcely begins to describe the attack, but there was ample reason to expect the baksheesh (bribes) to elicit that kind of response from the Islamists. There are many parallels you could draw, but take just one: the current U.S. approach toward Iran.

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The clerics in Iran have led crowds in chants of “death to America” for 30-plus years, but now protesters in Iran are reportedly shouting “death to Khamenei.” Bear in mind that the cleric Ayatollah Khamenei is the supreme leader in a regime predicated on the supremacy of religious law. Not only have the protesters dared to defy the government, to risk death while resisting the security forces sent to disperse them; they’re (again) challenging the legitimacy of the Iranian theocracy.

Could 2010 be for Iran what 1989 was for the USSR?

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President Obama has sought to buy off Iran with concessions and talks, so that Tehran will agree to end its nuclear program. This policy of so-called engagement (in reality, appeasement) has quite predictably shipwrecked (the administration is admitting as much). I have been arguing that Obama’s policy of appeasement works to galvanize Tehran in its belligerence, including notably its nuclear program. That appears to be an intensifying trend.

Secretary of State Clinton starts making noises that the time has come to “pressure” Iran with the additional sanctions. Iran scoffs at a bill in Congress that would sanction its fuel supply. And it successfully test fires an enhanced long-range Sejil 2 missile.

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“[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us,” Barack Obama suggested, nearly a year ago. Since then the Iranian regime has found itself inundated by the administration’s cordial invitations (to a July Fourth barbecue; to talks over its nuclear program; etc.) and unctuous affirmations of our good will (see this video). Even after the mass protests in Iran challenging the theocracy’s legitimacy, Team Obama declined to lend its support to the protesters and thereby endorsed the regime that was gunning them down in the streets. By the logic of Obama’s policy, all this should have induced Tehran to put aside its “decades of mistrust” (of us), and halt its nuclear program and its patronage of Islamist terrorism.

So how’s this working out?

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I thought I’d heard every last pseudo-explanation for why the militant regime in Iran really is seeking nuclear technology as a means, not to threaten others, but for some kind of peaceful purpose. Until recently.

The other week I attended a panel discussion on Iran featuring Hans Blix. Dr. Blix is a Swedish diplomat and the head of an outfit called The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (notably, he was involved in the UN inspections of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). The venue for the panel, moreover, was the annual conference of the Middle East Institute. All of which is to say that he is sufficiently respected a figure to be invited to address this informed, specialist audience. At the opening of his remarks, he seriously suggested that Iran could well be seeking nuclear technology, not for weapons, but for energy, because . . . nuclear power has the “ecological” benefit of avoiding pollution.

Yet: Iran has not sought to hook up its existing nuclear facilities to the electrical grid. More than that, who could seriously believe Iran cares one iota about the fate of its citizens, let alone the air they breathe (as Blix implies in re avoiding pollution)? Who could seriously believe that a regime that crushes its own people when they challenge its legitimacy; that tortures and murders political opponents; that funds vicious groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and the PLO; that has waged devastating attacks on American targets for years; who could seriously believe that a regime with such contempt for the lives of individuals within and without its borders could really have benign motives for its nuclear program? There’s no empirical basis for that belief.

Blix, like so many others, seems willing to dream up all manner of rationalizations for continued (so-called) diplomacy with Iran, rather than face the true nature of that regime and the need to stop its malignant ambitions.

image:wikiCommons

Bret Stephens at the WSJ skewers Obama’s team for failing to recognize — time after time — that so-called diplomatic overtures will not induce Iran to end its nuclear program. Reflecting on the last six years of attempted negotiations, he observes:

Yet even as Tehran’s rejections piled up, a view developed that all would be well if only the U.S. would drop the harsh rhetoric and meet with the Iranians face-to-face. So President Obama began making one overture after another to Iran, including a videotaped message praising its “great civilization.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei replied that Mr. Obama had “insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day.”

But there’s far more to this story. If we expand the timeframe from six to 30 years, it is not just Obama’s administration that ought to be rebuked.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, November 4, 1979, the U.S. embassy in Tehran was invaded and its personnel taken captive. That turned out to be the first act of war against us by what became the Islamic totalitarian regime in Iran. Read the rest of this entry »

Team Obama intends to use sanctions to dissuade Tehran from getting a nuke. So expect Tehran to ramp up work to arm itself (and perhaps its surrogates) with a nuke. The renewed push for “sanctions with bite” — following last week’s news of yet another clandestine Iranian nuclear facility — can serve only to abet Iran.

By “sanctions” our policy-makers do not mean the kind of painful, air-tight economic restrictions on trade that aim at imploding the regime, and so doing away with the threat it poses to us. No, the steps they have in mind aim at little more than inconveniencing the hostile regime — for example, travel bans on some Iranian government officials tied to the nuclear project, and (readily circumvented) limitations on foreign trade with certain Iranian banks. The point of such toothless sanctions is to cajole Iran into considering our syrupy offer of yet another second chance . . . to accept our latest appeasing deal.

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It took Obama days before he dared say anything remotely negative about the Iranian regime’s crackdown on protesters. Then we got his press briefing in which he was characterized as taking a firmer stand. When I see media reports portraying our president (or any of his recent predecessors) as taking a “firm” stand on some foreign-policy issue, I can’t help thinking that the standard for what counts as strength has sunk pitiably low. And I think that generally people under-appreciate the positive effect that a powerful, morally confident message can have.

What should our president say? My colleague Debi Ghate offers an inspiring answer to that question in a newly released op-ed, “What Obama Should Say To Iran.” (This draws on, and refines, some of what she wrote in a recent blog post.) If you have contacts (or friends with contacts) in Iran or the ex-pat Iranian community in the West, I would ask you to consider forwarding them the article.

This is one message the protesters — and the regime attempting to silence them — should hear.

[update: link to "What Obama Should to Iran"]

image cc attribution flickr/Hamed Saber