Don’t count on containing Iran.
Jerusalem
The Israeli debate over Iran’s nuclear program is, perhaps oddly, not yet heated. For now, the action is with the Americans: Israelis watch the negotiations nervously and without confidence, but there is little sense of impending doom—or impending war.
Opinion polls show that Israelis think Iran is
building toward a weapon, not toward a “capability,” and they pay attention to
Iran’s continuing acts of aggression (in Syria, for example), its support for
terrorism, and the constant statements from Iran’s leaders about eliminating
Israel from the map.
So why no panic? Perhaps Israel’s experiences
with war and terror, facing Arab armies and more recently Hezbollah and Hamas,
have immunized it from a panicked response. Perhaps there is faith in the
Israel Defense Forces’ ability to stop Iran if the need arises. Or perhaps
Israelis expect that in the end America will act to stop Iran from getting a
bomb.
But during a recent visit I found another
explanation as well—one that is more disturbing. Talking with members of what
I’d call the “security establishment,” I found the occasional appearance of
wishful thinking built around imagined Cold War analogies. That the Obama
administration appears to harbor precisely the same hopes is no cause for
comfort.
Here’s the theory: Once
upon a time the United States and the Soviet Union almost came to war, in the
Cuban Missile Crisis, and there were decades of deep and belligerent hostility.
But over time, with the growing desire among Russians for economic improvement
and the good things of life and the weakening of the Communist ideology among
the ruling elites, that hostility eroded. Diplomatic relations were opened
between Moscow and Washington, class warfare on a global scale was replaced by
“peaceful coexistence,” a hot line was established, summits proliferated, and
relations got into a groove of peaceful competition and occasional cooperation.
The Soviet Union became a status quo power with which America could do
business. So we waited, and watched while their economy rotted and their system
became unreformable, the rulers lost faith in it, and finally it fell. Without
a shot being fired, as Mrs. Thatcher once said.
So, the
theory continues, that’s what we need to seek with Iran. Perhaps we are at an
early stage; perhaps the religious elites, at any rate, haven’t lost their
fervor. But they’ve lost popular support, lost the youth and the businessmen,
and have realized they need a compromise. They are willing to slow down their
nuclear program. Now they are led by “moderates” like Hassan Rouhani and Javad
Zarif, who recognize the need for change. Time will erode their system just as
it did the Soviet system, so is a war really necessary and unavoidable? Sure,
if they leap toward a bomb, if they misjudge us, we’ll have to act or you
Americans will. But in Cold War terms maybe it isn’t 1962 and the missile
crisis and DEFCON 2; maybe it’s the 1970s or 1980s, and maybe there’s only a
decade or so to go. So maybe we just wait.
That
Israelis should entertain such a theory is natural, considering the price they
might pay for an attack on Iran. And while rehearsing this approach they always
repeat that if at some point they see Iran jumping for the bomb, they will have
to bomb Iran. Still, what is striking is how this theory—whether expounded by
Israelis or by Obama administration supporters—misunderstands the Cold War and
its lessons.
First, it
has to be said that Mrs. Thatcher’s wonderful line about Reagan winning the
Cold War “without firing a shot” is false. Throughout the Cold War we fired
shots. The greatest number of American casualties came in Korea and Vietnam,
but on many other battlegrounds our soldiers and CIA agents, and our proxy
forces, killed and died. Containment was not a series of speeches but a
military strategy designed to impose costs on the Soviets and to constrain
their behavior. Moreover, defeat on those foreign battlefields weakened the
USSR and its alliance system—and perhaps more importantly weakened the party’s
hold at home. There is no better example of this than the Soviet defeat in
Afghanistan. For we understood that the way a tyranny keeps power is by
tyrannizing, which defeat lessens its ability to do. It shows the populace that
the rulers are not invincible, have been beaten, and may be beaten again.
From this
perspective, recent American policy toward Iran is demoralizing—both to
Iranians seeking freedom and to us. The American refusal to act in Syria, the
unwillingness to see that the real war there is with Iran and its allies and
proxies, the decision instead to permit Iranian and Hezbollah forces to fight
there and keep Assad in power can only have strengthened the Islamic Republic.
An Iranian elite that watched the Americans draw a red line in Syria and then
back away from it can only view the red line we have drawn on their acquiring
nuclear weapons as unconvincing.
In fact,
if the history of the Cold War was a series of American hot wars, large and
small, direct and indirect, that repeatedly confronted Soviet power, the record
with Iran is the opposite. The Iranian regime has been killing Americans since
the 1980s, in terrorist attacks in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and through their
very active role in Afghanistan and Iraq. For all those killings they have
never paid a price, even though the U.S. government knew and spoke publicly
about their supplying weapons, IEDs, training, and fighters to attack us. If
vigorous American containment moved Moscow toward coexistence and weakened its
ideological fervor over time, the lack of such American action should suggest
that Iranian elites are far from that condition.
Second,
the early Cold War was a time of nuclear proliferation. Stalin wanted the bomb,
and so did Mao, and, more strikingly, so did the British and the French.
Consider: We were in a tight post-World War II alliance with them in NATO, we
were together in governing Germany, there were ironclad American commitments to
defend Europe against the Soviets . . . yet the British and the French both
said, “Thanks, that’s great, but we need the bomb too.” The lesson may be that
if Iran gets the bomb, it is inevitable that the Saudis, Turks, and others will
smile at possible American offers of defense arrangements and pledges, but see
them as no substitute for their own little “force
de frappe.”
Third,
the comparison of Soviet and Iranian elites is itself misleading, for the
Islamic Republic is still led by men motivated by religious faith. It was hard
enough for the West to come, finally, to an understanding of communism as a
substitute faith; books like The God That Failed taught us the nature of Communist
belief. But Communist ideology was a weak reed when compared with belief in one
of the great world religions. While Das Kapital was written just three years before
Lenin’s birth, the ayatollahs have a real faith, not a substitute one. It is
true that they have perverted Shia Islam with the state takeover of religion,
and true that the older quietist school still has many adherents, but that does
not suggest that the clergy running the regime are beginning to second-guess
themselves and are about to produce a Gorbachev.
What
produced a change in Soviet behavior was the willingness of the West, led by
the United States, to fight the Cold War on the ground—and the willingness to
fight it ideologically. Several Israeli officials reminded me that Reagan
negotiated with the Russians just as Obama is negotiating with Iran. And the
United States and the USSR had diplomatic relations, constant diplomatic
contacts, and even regular summit meetings. That’s true but misleading, for
while the Americans negotiated they also attacked: under Truman, Kennedy, and
Reagan perhaps most forcefully. Reagan, after all, did not allow his desire for
negotiations to prevent him from saying the Soviet Union was an “evil empire”
that would end up on the “ash heap of history.”
The
United States spent vast sums over the decades on Radio Free Europe, Radio
Liberty, and similar efforts to undermine the Soviets, harnessing intellectual
candle-power from the days immediately after World War II to the campaign of
support for Solidarity in Poland. The missing equivalent today would be a
campaign to undermine Assad in Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and above all the
Islamic Republic itself—not just by sabotaging centrifuges but by sabotaging
its belief system, empowering dissident groups, and providing far wider
Internet access just as during the Cold War we provided fax machines. The
lesson of the Cold War is that any moves toward negotiation and coexistence on
the military and diplomatic level must be matched by greater ideological
clarity and aggressiveness on our side, or the message will be that we are
giving up the struggle. That message will be received both by the regime, which
will become more confident and more aggressive, and by the populace, whose
hopes for freedom and whose willingness to struggle for it will be diminished.
Such
clarity is entirely missing from the Obama administration’s approach to Iran,
and has been since the Iranian people rose up in June 2009 and were greeted by
American hesitancy and silence. Today we have instead what Ray Takeyh has
called “the Rouhani narrative”: the administration’s explanation that Rouhani
and his crowd are moderates whom we must strengthen by entering into agreements
that lessen sanctions and make compromises on the nuclear file. Build them up,
the argument goes, or the Revolutionary Guards and the supreme leader will get
tired of them and throw them out.
The
lessons of the Cold War teach that this is entirely wrong. First, there’s
precious little evidence that people like Rouhani and Zarif are “moderates,” in
the sense that they lean our way on human rights issues, Syria, or the nuclear
weapons program. During Zarif’s recent visit to Beirut he laid a wreath at the
grave of the terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, who was responsible for killing more
Americans than any terrorists before 9/11. That’s moderation? Second, we do not
strengthen such reformist voices as exist when we appear weak. The best
argument such “moderates”—if they exist—could make is that aggressive actions
in Syria or support for terror overseas or refusal to compromise on nukes are
dangerous for Iran and threaten its security interests. When we act in ways
that undermine this argument and suggest that we will do anything to avoid a
confrontation, we strengthen the hardest of hardliners. When President Obama
reversed himself on Syria, does anyone think Iranian “moderates” were
strengthened—or instead the regime elements saying, “Press on, they are weak,
they will get out of our way”? The best gifts Reagan gave those Russians who
were really reformers were rising American defense budgets, support for rebels
confronting Soviet-backed regimes in places like Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and
the endless ideological warfare against communism.
The
lesson is not that an American or Israeli attack on Iran is inevitable or
preferable, only that the way to avoid it is clear thinking, a forceful
diplomatic, economic, and ideological stand against the regime at home—and a
military pushback against its adventurism abroad. Facing the Obama
administration, Iran circa 2014 seems less like the Soviet Union of 1982 under
the aging Brezhnev facing Reagan’s defense budgets and his ideological clarity
than it does the Soviet Union acting in Angola, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan in
1979 and facing a Jimmy Carter who urged us to get over our inordinate fear of
communism.
But after
Carter came Reagan, the argument continues; doesn’t that teach us to wait, if
necessary for another president and a new foreign policy? If we are confident
Iran will not cross the nuclear finish line, perhaps. But 2017 is far away;
from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to the presidential election of 1980
was only 10 months. If 2017 may be too late, if Iran will reach a nuclear
capability far sooner, erroneous lessons from the Cold War offer no comfort. Reagan
did not wait out the Soviets, he beat them. We have no such strategy now toward
Iran.
Elliott
Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign
Relations and author of Tested by
Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Eliot Abrams writes: “Talking with members of what I’d call
the “security establishment,” I found the occasional appearance of wishful
thinking built around imagined Cold War analogies.”
Fortunately for us, neither
the PM nor the defense minister have these illusions.
Netanyahu:
A few years ago
Netanyahu held an in-depth discussion with Middle East expert Bernard
Lewis. At the end of the talk he was convinced that if the ayatollahs obtained
nuclear weapons, they would use them. Since that day, Netanyahu seems convinced
that we are living out a rerun of the 1930s.
Netanyahu quoted
Bernard Lewis in his speech to the UN General Assembly in 2012:
“There’s a great scholar
of the Middle East, Prof. Bernard Lewis, who put it best. He said that for the
Ayatollahs of Iran, mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent, it’s an
inducement
Iran’s apocalyptic
leaders believe that a medieval holy man will reappear in the wake of a
devastating Holy War, thereby ensuring that their brand of radical Islam will
rule the earth.”
But the Iranians are
rational, and the use of nuclear weapons is an irrational act. Like the
Soviets, they will never do that.
“A Western individual
observing the fantastic ambitions of the Iranian leadership scoffs: ‘What do
they think, that they will Islamize us?’ The surprising answer is: Yes, they
think they will Islamize us: The ambition of the present regime in Tehran is
for the Western world to become Muslim at the end of a lengthy process. Accordingly, we have to understand that their
rationality is completely different from our rationality. Their concepts are
different and their considerations are different. They are completely unlike
the formerSoviet Union. They are not even like Pakistan or North
Korea. If Iran enjoys
a nuclear umbrella and the feeling of strength of a nuclear power, there is no
knowing how it will behave. It will be impossible to accommodate a nuclear Iran and
it will be impossible to attain stability. The consequences of a nuclear Iran will be catastrophic.”
