THE PLANK NOVEMBER 23, 2009
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CFR has an illuminating interview with Carnegie's George Perkovich:
[W]hat happened is that Jalili returned from Vienna to a place where the leadership had systematically made enemies of many in the Iranian establishment, including the speaker of the Parliament, Ali Larijani, who was the former chief nuclear negotiator and who himself has been regarded as a pretty hard-line guy. Ahmadinejad in the past had belittled him and said that he was weak, and so now was time for payback. Everybody who had been angered or frustrated or brow-beaten by Ahmadinejad turned around and dumped on him. So Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of the opposition, and Mehdi Karroubi, the other leader of the opposition, as well as Larijani, all denounced the Vienna accord as a weak-kneed accommodation to the West, that it was giving away "our great patrimony." The deal actually is very good for Iran, and so the explanation for the turnaround is Iranian politics.
Perkovich basically sees no hope for productive negotiations with Iran, and advises the Obama administration to "draw the line and enforce that Iran doesn't go from the capability to making nuclear weapons." But of course the US has been drawing lines for years, to no effect.
(For more good expert opinion on Iran, check out this lucid presentation by nukes expert Matt Bunn of Harvard, who warns against the false hope that we can halt nuclear enrichment in Iran.)
7 comments
"...The deal actually is very good for Iran, and so the explanation for the turnaround is Iranian politics..." Perhaps the explanation is simply that the Iranians never were bargaining in good faith. Sadly, I think that they are being coldly rational. With no worries about economic sanctions or military attack, they really have nothing to gain and both the loss of external/internal face and the loss of a strategic game changer to lose.
- malahat
November 23, 2009 at 7:13pm
But this does tend to debunk the notion that supporting the opposition in Iran (as opposed to merely condemning the regime's violence) would have been consistent with trying to stop a nuclear-armed Iran.
- dhurtado
November 23, 2009 at 8:51pm
Iran will, inevitably, become a nuclear power. There is nothing remotely practical that we can do to stop it, and the sooner we acknowledge this rather obvious fact the better. Our interests are better served by looking for ways to modify the nature of the Iranian regime over time than by continuing with idle speculation about measures that even if taken won't solve the problem, but seems in practice to only reinforce the position of the hard-liners.
- Robert Powell
November 24, 2009 at 4:29am
Hurtado, supporting the opposition should have been done because it's the right thing to do. Moussavi, et al. would be better for the US as interlocutors than the current thugocracy. And we are never wrong when we support freedom over tyranny, even if, as here, the improvement would be incremental. Agreed, rp, as I have been arguing for some time. Deterrence plus should be our national policy, and the sooner we articulate it, the better.
- butchie b
November 24, 2009 at 11:17am
"...For the Romans did in these cases what all wise princes should do: they not only have to have regard for present troubles but also for future ones, and they have to avoid these with all their industry because, when one foresees from afar, one can easily find a remedy for them but when you wait until they come close to you, the medicine is not in time because the disease has become incurable..." The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli, Chapter III
- malahat
November 24, 2009 at 12:43pm
Butchie, that is a different question than whether there was a relationship between supporting the opposition and stopping Iran's nuclear program, which some people in these blogs have argued. As to supporting "freedom over tyranny," there is no real basis characterizing the uprisings as a struggle for freedom over tyranny. Mousavi and Karroubi come from the same mold as the thugs and there is no particular reason to believe that either one of their regimes would not also be a "thugocracy." Moreover, though the supporters of Mousavi and Karroubi believed the election had been rigged, it has not, to my knowledge, ever been established that Ahmadinijad did not actually receive more than 50% of the vote. So what do you mean by "freedom over tyranny." Freedom of the disappointed opposition to violently overthrow the incumbent regime and install their own tyrant? And which leader should the US have supported, Mousavi or Karroubi?
- dhurtado
November 24, 2009 at 2:41pm
I don't pretend that the Iranian opposition are all little d democrats, or that a Jefferson breathes among them. However, it seems to me that the opposition devil would be more to our liking than the current crew, and the opposition does seem more oriented toward good relations with the West. Surely a few sentences from POTUS would not hurt our already non-existent relations with the current bozos. As to which leader to support, I am agnostic.
- butchie b
November 24, 2009 at 3:46pm