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Face to Face: Tehran v. Washington

The Gathering Storm, October 3, 2009

Rick Santorum

October 2, 2009

Yesterday marked a surprise ending to a week filled with breaths held the world over as the first direct negotiations in 30 years took place between Washington and Tehran in the presence of five other major powers in Geneva, Switzerland. The verdict? Iran has agreed to send most of its known nuclear fuel abroad (with Russia being the primary recipient), and United Nations inspectors will be allowed to visit its newly unveiled nuclear facility in Qom within two weeks. President Obama called the results of the talks a "constructive beginning" (the parties will hold a second round of talks by October's end),but called on Iran to "demonstrate its commitment to transparency."

The plot leading up to the long-awaited meeting began thickening late last week as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) revealed that Tehran was building a second uranium enrichment plant outside of Qom (a holy city in Shi'a Islam), the discovery of which has accelerated the need for answersin the debate over whether Iran is indeed designing nuclear warheads. While Iranian officials continue to deny Western suspicions toward this end, U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown were up front in defining the boundaries of their patience and demanding Iranian transparency at last week's opening of the G-20 talks in Pittsburgh.

A clear signal was sent in response to the scolding on Monday, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps testing a long-range Shahab-3 missile successfully after a weekend of medium-range missile tests. This in turn triggered an earnest White House scramble for a comprehensive package of economic sanctions, with a broader coalition of allies to support them in the likelihood that China and Russia veto those harsher measures proposed in the UN Security Council.

Meanwhile, as articulated so clearly by Anne Applebaum in this week's Washington Post, the "other Iran," that "of the democracy movement, the Iran analyzed by human rights activists," finds itself all but irrelevant in the overhead emphasis on nuclear deterrence. But what can't be ignored is that only one in ten Iranians support the pursuit of nuclear weapons, and many continue to question the government's legitimacy after the fraudulent elections held in June. Moreover, a poll conducted by the non-partisan World Public Opinion found that two-thirds of Iranians would favor their government precluding the development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against Iran.

This is not something to ignore. There is a connection between the so-called "two Irans", obviously,and it should be reflected in the strategy of our response. Anne Applebaum gives a third alternative along these lines:

The people who make decisions about Iran's nuclear program are the same people who order the arrests, tortures and murders of dissidents. Indeed, one can learn quite a lot about how these Iranian decision-makers will behave abroad by observing their behavior at home...

...Very few security experts point out that there is another option. What do Iran's rulers truly fear? I'll wager that the answer is not sanctions and that it might not be a bombing raid, either. An economic boycott can be circumvented, after all, with the help of Venezuela or maybe the Russian mafia, and an attack on Iranian soil might help the regime once again consolidate power. By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic?

 

Hear, hear.My fear is that we're too late. Precipice' point is an unpleasant place, and it's dangerously too bad that we waited until now to think hard about human rights, regime change, and velvet revolutions in Iran. Here's to hoping that Obama starts acting like the President he is meant to be.