[Mb-civic] Bush's Choice on Iran - Jackson Diehl - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Bush's Choice on Iran

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, January 30, 2006; A17

The debate on Iran is drifting toward the ugly question that the Bush 
administration would most like to avoid. That is: Is it preferable for 
the United States to live with the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran, 
or with those of a unilateral American military strike against Iranian 
nuclear facilities?

President Bush has never answered that question; instead, he and his 
State Department have repeatedly called an Iranian bomb "intolerable" 
while building a diplomatic coalition that won't tolerate a military 
solution. But two of our more principled senators, Republican John 
McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian 
Choice -- and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct: 
"There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a 
military option," he said on "Face the Nation." "That is a nuclear-armed 
Iran."

It's easy to see why the Bush administration prefers ambiguity to 
McCain's decisive judgment. After all, both options are terrible, and 
everyone can agree that diplomacy is worth a try. Yet Bush and both 
parties in Congress ought to be thinking through their own answers to 
the Iranian Choice, for two reasons. First, it looks more likely than 
not that the United States will, in the end, have to make that decision; 
and, second, the answer to the question ought to shape how the coming 
diplomatic phase is managed.

One driver of the choice is the ranting of Iranian President Mahmoud 
Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust -- which, contrary to what a 
Western secular sensibility might suggest, is not necessarily a bluff. 
As Lieberman put it in his "Face the Nation" appearance a week ago, "if 
we should have learned one thing from 9/11 . . . it is that when 
somebody says over and over again, as Osama bin Laden did during the 
'90s, 'I hate you and give me the chance, I will kill you,' they may 
mean it and try to do it." If the West is going to gamble that it can 
contain a religious fanatic who possesses nuclear weapons and vows to 
wipe Israel from the map, it should do so knowingly, and not because it 
failed to provide for the possibility that an extremist would not 
respond to conventional diplomacy.

Another decision forcer is that, for all the talk among Iran watchers 
about opposition within the regime to Ahmadinejad, there is no evidence 
that anyone in Tehran disagrees with his judgment about negotiations 
with the West -- which is that Iran has no need to make a deal. Iranian 
leaders were universally dismissive of the offer made last summer by the 
European Union. There is no indication that any senior leader or faction 
favors giving up uranium enrichment, under any circumstances. Not even 
the democratic opposition wants it.

So the United States must approach the coming maneuvering in and outside 
the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency board, and 
any last-minute negotiations in Vienna, Moscow or Tehran, the way the 
Iranians probably do: not as an end in itself but as a prelude to more 
meaningful action. If the ultimate intent is to contain, rather than 
attack, the Iranian nuclear program, then dilatory and fruitless 
negotiations -- like those of the past two years -- are worthy and even 
desirable. Not only do they slow Iran's bomb-building but they help to 
cement a global coalition that might be able to deter the regime from 
actually using an eventual weapon over a long twilight era, Cold War-style.

If this is the choice, then aggressive efforts to support the Iranian 
democratic opposition also make sense, since over time the regime might 
be undermined from within. Russia and China should be courted. 
Brinkmanship -- like interrupting Iranian oil exports, or prompting 
Tehran to do so -- is to be avoided, since there is no military option 
to fall back on if the mullahs don't blink.

On the other hand, if McCain is right, then the current diplomatic 
campaign should be compressed. As in the case of Iraq, the United 
Nations and sanctions should be explored just long enough to show that 
the United States has tried them. That's because the timeline for 
military action is much shorter than that of containment: While it might 
not complete work on a weapon for five or even 10 years, according to 
most intelligence estimates, Iran will probably pass what Israel calls 
the "point of no return" far sooner. After that point, when Tehran will 
have acquired all the means it needs to manufacture a bomb, it would be 
considerably more difficult to stop the Iranian program by force. So, if 
military action is preferable to containment, then brinkmanship is 
called for, while promotion of Iranian democracy, or painstaking 
cultivation of Russia and China, is a waste of time.

So what is the Bush administration doing? It is allowing talks to drag 
on, and slowly courting Russia and China, but doing next to nothing to 
help Iranian democrats; it is drawing up lists of sanctions that, if 
imposed, might trigger a crisis, but it is also laying the groundwork 
for long-term containment. Perhaps the president has decided what course 
he will choose if Iranian uranium enrichment proceeds in spite of 
negotiations, U.N. resolutions or even sanctions. If so, his 
administration's current tactics show no sign of it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/29/AR2006012900687.html?nav=hcmodule
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