[Mb-civic] Iran's Gift: New Unity In the West - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Iran's Gift: New Unity In the West

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, February 23, 2006; A19

The fog of negotiation is not for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 
He prefers to confront the United States and Europe directly over Iran's 
nuclear and political ambitions. The ex-mayor of Tehran thus sets 
history's tectonic plates moving faster toward a new era of global conflict.

Two visible changes suggest how far-reaching this conflict is becoming: 
First, Europeans, not Americans, are the primary immediate targets of 
Iran's recent gauntlet-hurling. Second, the Europeans are tossing the 
gauntlets back at Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian firebrand seems to believe that intimidating Britain, France 
and Germany provides a surer path to nuclear weapons, hegemony over Iraq 
and the destruction of Israel than did the softer-shoe approach of his 
ayatollah predecessors. Ahmadinejad is the gift to President Bush's 
diplomats that keeps on giving.

An intent to menace probably prompted the dispatch of mobs in Tehran and 
Damascus this month to burn a sudden abundance of Danish flags and to 
chant "Death to Austria." That small country sits temporarily in the 
chair of the European Union presidency -- a fact you certainly had at 
your fingertips, too.

European governments are responding with a firmness and resolve that 
might not have been predictable even a few months ago. But their 
movement has been several years in the making: Beset by terrorist bombs 
and ghetto riots in their cities, and political murders of a Dutch 
filmmaker and others on their soil in the name of Allah, as well as the 
sacking of diplomatic outposts in the cartoon riots, Europeans are 
awakening to the possibility of a return to an era of global bipolar 
conflict that directly involves them.

Ahmadinejad had already emerged for U.S. policymakers as the new face of 
the enemy in "the long war" against Islamic extremism. White House 
officials suspect he hopes to build an ideological counterweight of 
radical Islamic power to Bush's democracy agenda in the greater Middle East.

In that sense, Ahmadinejad fills a policy need. Saddam Hussein is so 
yesterday in the American political psyche. The Pentagon's determination 
to fight wars that can be won by network-centric technology -- 
overcoming integrated air defense systems with bombing campaigns, for 
example -- is badly mismatched with the nasty insurgency in Iraq. But it 
would get new life in Iran.

Considering the troubles the United States faces in Iraq, I shudder to 
think that one of Don Rumsfeld's life lessons is this: If you cannot 
solve a problem, enlarge it. But the Bush administration is embarked on 
a serious international diplomatic effort to isolate and contain Iran 
and its allies and should be given credit for that. Hold the paranoia, 
at least for the moment.

The science of plate tectonics calls a moment such as this convergent 
boundary movement. That happens when two 50-mile-thick shelves of Earth 
are on a collision course. And an important collateral shift also 
appears: While the distances between them remain large, the European and 
American plates of perception begin to move in the same direction again.

U.S. diplomacy is adroit enough under Condoleezza Rice to benefit from 
Ahmadinejad's sticking of the Iranian thumb in every available eye, 
including Russia's. But the real story of the new transatlantic 
togetherness has been the spreading public concern in Europe about 
Islamic extremism, at home and abroad.

That concern is increasingly shared even by the Old Continent's sizable 
Muslim minorities. With some execrable exceptions, they have publicly 
distanced themselves from the embassy-burning, throat-cutting fanatics 
who claim to speak for their religion.

And Europe's tendency to see Israel as the source of all Middle East 
evil must adjust, however reluctantly, to the political demise of the 
Palestine Liberation Organization and of a certain romantic vision of 
Palestinian nationalism at the hands of Hamas. That Islamic organization 
rejects peace negotiations and a two-state solution even more firmly 
than do Israeli hawks.

This is not to suggest that the "happy" days of threat-enforced Cold War 
unity are here again. Divergences will persist over whether Western 
money can and should be channeled around a Hamas-led government to the 
Palestinian police. Europe is for channeling; the United States is 
against. (Europe has the better long-term case.)

But such differences become more tactical than strategic in the new 
policy environment. Old disagreements over Iraq become less important 
than new agreements on Iran. When French President Jacques Chirac 
suggests, even obliquely, as he did recently, that the use of nuclear 
weapons is a possible response to terrorism that threatens France, the 
grinding of tectonic plates can be heard beneath his words and beneath 
the protests from the Iranians that they were the target of Chirac's 
remarks.

The new transatlantic unity of purpose and perception is fragile. It 
must be maintained through effective consultation, disciplined 
diplomacy, and the continued shelving by the Bush administration of its 
unilateralist impulses and its tendency to overreach. The alternative to 
diplomacy is a Rumsfeldian military expansion of the problem that no one 
-- not even Ahmadinejad -- should want.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/22/AR2006022202013.html
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