The Pakistani Spectator

The Iran dilemma(s) are perplexing for their multidimensionality:  The ‘Iran’ item on the foreign policy agenda encompasses, inter alia the nuclear/nuclear weapons programs: regional security in the Gulf; Iran’s current and prospective roles in Iraq and Afghanistan; a terrorism(s) connection; and strategic energy interests.  Their delineation is complicated by the opacity of the regime’s decision-making, and now the acute domestic crisis.  Making sense of all this demands discrimination and discipline – in intellectual as well as policy terms. Unhappily, if predictably, those elements have been distinguished by their absence.

Policy advocacy is beyond my capacities as someone who neither has direct experience of the country nor studied it nor knows Farsi.  So I shall restrict myself to striking a few cautionary points.  Policy wisdom, after all, is the product of discriminatingly identified unwise policy inclinations.

1. The United States’ ability to influence internal politics in a positive direction is close to nil.  Too close and public an embrace of the opposition is the kiss of death.  Too, they do not need us to inspire them.  And they surely know that we wish them well and would be forthcoming were they to succeed.  As to the regime factions, we know next to nothing as to who’s who and what’s going on; so ignore those who claim that they do.
2. We, therefore, should prepare ourselves for dealing with the leaders in Tehran even under these fluid conditions.  It is all too easy to conclude, on the basic of developments over the past eight months, that any form of engagement is a lost cause.  That is an excuse for a blunt, more confrontational and dangerous stance that holds out little promise of success and forecloses future demarches.
3. The only avenue that holds out any hope of reaching a modus vivendi with     the current regime (and perhaps a successor – if there is one) is a comprehensive approach.  That is to say, for the West to put on the table the elements of a grand bargain that may entail: lifting the economic and diplomatic embargo; and fashioning a place for Iran in a Gulf security arrangement.  The Iranians, in turn, would have to put in play everything that concerns us.  A resuscitation of the April 2003 Iranian  initiative.  Anything short of that is shadow play, and a waste of energy.