Why are liberals campaigning to make this most illiberal regime acceptable?
By BRET STEPHENS
In Syria, Bashar Assad is
trying to bring his enemies to heel by blocking humanitarian convoys to
desperate civilians living in besieged towns. The policy is called “starve or kneel,” and
it is openly supported by Hezbollah and tacitly by Iran, which has deployed its
elite Quds Force to aid Mr. Assad’s war effort.
So what better time for right-thinking liberals to ask:
“Is Iran really so evil?”
That’s the title of a revealing essay in Politico by Stephen
Kinzer, a
former New York Times reporter
now at Brown University. “The demonization of Iran is arguably the most bizarre
and self-defeating of all U.S. foreign policies,” Mr. Kinzer begins. “Americans
view Iran not simply as a country with interests that sometimes conflict with
ours but as a relentless font of evil.”
Mr. Kinzer’s essay was published Sunday, as sanctions
were lifted on Tehran and four of America’s hostages came home after lengthy
imprisonments. The Obama administration publicly insists that the nuclear deal
does not mean the U.S. should take a benign view of Iran, but the more
enthusiastic backers of the agreement think otherwise. “Our perception of Iran
as a threat to vital American interests is increasingly disconnected from
reality,” Mr. Kinzer writes. “Events of the past week may slowly begin to erode
the impulse that leads Americans to believe patriotism requires us to hate
Iran.”
What a weird thought. My own patriotism has never been
touched one way or another by my views of Iran. Nor do I hate Iran—if by “Iran”
one means the millions of people who marched alongsideNeda Agha-Soltan when
she was gunned down by
regime thugs in the 2009 Green Revolution, or the fellow travelers of Hashem
Shaabani,the Arab-Iranian poet executed two years ago for “waging war on God,”
or the thousands of candidates who are routinely barred from running for
Parliament for being insufficiently loyal to the Supreme Leader.
This is the Iran that liberals like Mr. Kinzer ought to
support, not the theocratic usurpers who claim to speak in Iran’s name while
stepping on Iranian necks. But we are long past the day when a liberal U.S.
foreign policy meant shaping our interests around our values—not the other way
around—much less supporting the liberal aspirations of people everywhere,
especially if they live in anti-American dictatorships.
Today’s liberal foreign policy, to adapt Churchill, is
appeasement wrapped in realism inside moral equivalency. When it comes to Iran
policy, that means believing that we have sinned at least as much against the
Iranians as they have sinned against us; that our national-security interests
require us to come to terms with the Iranians; and that the best way to allay
the suspicions—and, over time, diminish the influence—of Iranian hard-liners is
by engaging the moderates ever more closely and demonstrating ever-greater
diplomatic flexibility.
That’s a neat theory, proved wrong by experience at every
turn. The Carter administration hailed the Ayatollah Khomeini as
“a saint.” Our embassy was seized. Ronald Reagan sent
Khomeini a birthday cake, along with secret arms, to facilitate the release of
hostages in Lebanon. A few hostages were released, while others were taken in
their place. The world welcomed the election of “moderate” President Mohammad
Khatami in
1997. Iran’s illicit nuclear facilities were exposed during his second term.
In 2009, on the eve of presidential elections, the New
York Times’sRoger Cohen celebrated “the vibrancy of a
changing, highly educated society” that he had found on his visits to Tehran.
“The equating of Iran with terror today is simplistic,” he wrote. After the
election, he ran for his life from the terror of the same street militia that
had murdered Agha-Soltan.
Now we’re supposed to believe that the change Mr. Cohen
and others had hoped for has finally arrived. The proof, supposedly, is that
the regime has so far kept to its nuclear promises (in exchange for a $100
billion windfall), that it swiftly released U.S. sailors (after scoring a small
propaganda coup), and that it let the other hostages go (though only after very
nearly taking the wife and mother of one of those hostages in his turn, and
then after an additional $1.7 billion reward from the U.S.).
Are these signs of a new-and-improved regime? Or merely
one that is again being given good reasons to believe that it can always
extract a bribe for its bad behavior? The notion of moral hazard, fundamental
to economics, has a foreign-policy dimension, too. Any country that believes it
will never be made to pay the price for the risks it takes will take
ever-greater risks. It’s bad enough when the country in question is Greece.
This is Iran.
Iran will become a “normal” country only when it ceases
to be an Islamic Republic. In the meantime, the only question is how far we are
prepared to abase ourselves in our quest to normalize it.
