[Mb-civic] IMPORTANT AND TIMELY: Containing Tehran - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Containing Tehran

By David Ignatius
Friday, January 20, 2006; A17

How should the United States think about Iran? What explains the 
fanaticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and what can America and 
its allies do to change it?

These baseline questions are at the heart of an informal review of Iran 
policy that's taking place at the highest levels of the Bush 
administration. The discussions, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza 
Rice and national security adviser Stephen Hadley, are an effort to 
anchor America's opposition to the Iranian nuclear program in a broader 
strategy. The goal is not simply to stop the Iranians from making a bomb 
but to change the character of a regime that under Ahmadinejad has 
swerved onto a new and dangerous track.

In crafting their Iran policy, administration officials don't want the 
nuclear issue to be isolated from the more basic problem of Tehran's 
erratic and potentially destabilizing role in the Middle East. The 
message to Iran is that while the United States opposes Iranian nuclear 
weapons, it supports a technologically advanced Iran that, as it 
matures, can play a leading role in the region. A shorthand for the 
administration's policy aim might be: No to Ahmadinejad, yes to the 
Iranian people and a modern Iran.

The administration wants to engage key allies in these Iran discussions. 
In the short run, the goal is to gain agreement among European allies, 
Russia and China that the International Atomic Energy Agency, at its 
meeting next month, should refer the Iranian nuclear issue to the U.N. 
Security Council. But over the longer term, the administration hopes 
these allies will work with Washington to change Iranian behavior on 
issues such as terrorism and regional stability. Officials don't like 
the Cold War term "containment," believing that it connotes a static 
policy, but the word suggests the strategic commitment they want on Iran.

Rice and Hadley recognize that the United States carries a lot of 
baggage in its dealings with Iran. They want to avoid, if possible, a 
situation that appears to be a Bush vs. Iran confrontation. The 
administration decided last year to work the nuclear problem through the 
European Union countries negotiating with Iran -- Britain, France and 
Germany -- in part to avoid making America the issue. Although the E.U. 
negotiations have failed to stop the Iranian nuclear program, 
administration officials hope to maintain a united front as the issue 
moves toward the United Nations.

A key question for U.S. officials is how to assess Ahmadinejad's 
radicalism. Many were surprised by the belligerent tone of his speech to 
the U.N. General Assembly last September, and worries deepened after his 
reckless statements denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel's 
destruction. The toxic spirit of the 1979 revolution seemed to have 
returned.

An intellectual benchmark in the Iran debate was a briefing given to 
officials last fall by Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason 
University who is an expert on revolutions. He argued that Iran wasn't 
conforming to the standard model laid out in Crane Brinton's famous 
study, "The Anatomy of Revolution," which argued that initial upheaval 
is followed by a period of consolidation and eventual stability. 
Instead, Ahmadinejad illustrated what Goldstone called "the return of 
the radicals." Something similar happened 15 to 20 years after the 
Russian and Chinese revolutions -- with Stalin's purges in the late 
1930s and Mao's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Goldstone explained. 
He argued that Iran was undergoing a similar recrudescence of radicalism 
that, as in China and Russia, would inevitably trigger internal conflict.

The gist of Goldstone's analysis gradually percolated up to Rice, Hadley 
and others. What has intrigued policymakers is the argument that 
Ahmadinejad's extremism will eventually trigger a counterreaction -- 
much as the Cultural Revolution in China led to the pragmatism of Deng 
Xiaoping. Officials see signs that some Iranian officials -- certainly 
former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and perhaps also the supreme leader, 
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- are worried by Ahmadinejad's fulminations. 
Unless the Iranian president moderates his line, wider splits in the 
regime are almost inevitable, officials believe. They also predict that 
his extremism will be increasingly unpopular with the Iranian people, 
who want to be more connected with the rest of the world rather than 
more isolated.

Getting Iran policy right is the biggest foreign policy challenge of the 
new year. Ahmadinejad's wild statements have had the beneficial effect 
of concentrating the minds of policymakers, who in the past have often 
differed over Iran and have had trouble framing a formal policy. 
Officials don't yet have a clear strategy that could bend Iranian 
radicalism back toward an acceptable norm, but they're assessing the 
tools that might work. This time they are looking carefully -- and 
thinking seriously -- before they leap.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011902523.html
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