Monday’s announcement that the most authoritative American
intelligence officials have concluded that Iran has not been pursuing the
development of a nuclear weapon since 2003 and couldn’t possibly have a nuclear
weapon before 2009, and probably not until 2015, even if it began today, comes
as wonderful news.
The National Intelligence Estimate contained this
extraordinary refutation of the most bellicose conservatives in American
politics, “Our assessment that Iran
halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure
indicators Tehran’s
decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon
irrespective of the political, economics, and military costs.” In other words,
the headline for all the Orientalists out there is: “Iran’s Government is Rational.” Perhaps
if anyone in the Bush Administration ever bothered to talk with Iranians, they
would have known this long ago.
The rhetoric coming from President Ahmadinejad
has shown an aggressive Anti-Semitism to be sure, but he is neither in charge
of policy nor capable of doing anything substantive to hurt Israel. This
fact combined with the NIE news makes President Bush’s invocation of a possible
WW III a few months ago seem rather paranoid. To be fair, however, there remains compelling evidence that Iran had a weapons program until 2003, and until recently, there was little reason to believe their claims that it had been halted.. Not surprisingly, but not without justification, the White House tried
to take some credit for the finding and suggested this defensive caveat, “But
the intelligence also tells us that the risk of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon
remains a very serious problem.” But serious enough to ignore
diplomacy? That strikes me as excessively stubborn, especially given Tehran’s restraint since
2003.
On the other hand, and at the very least, the harshest conservative
criticisms of the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy seemed widely off the
mark. One piece of conventional anti-Iraq war wisdom is that the Bush
Administration has strengthened its worst enemy, the Shia
in Iran, by liberating the Shia (and Kurds) from Saddam’s Iraq, and that this is somehow something
that should be criticized and feared rather than celebrated. Of course, it did
make Iran better off, but removing the threat that Iraq posed to Iran makes the
latter more secure and less apt to waste spending on military affairs rather
than on economic growth. It’s true that Iran has meddled in the affairs of
its newly liberated neighbor, and the government has probably been supporting
the insurgency there against US and Iraqi government forces. Yet, there are
reports that this has stopped. In any case, the US should never be willing to
support dictators simply because they are enemies of autocrats.
I am aware that this is a minority viewpoint. One could list
hundreds of experts or pundits, mostly from the left, but occasionally from the
anti neo-conservative right, who have suggested that Iraqi stability was
preferable to regional instability and Iranian influence. Relatedly,
there has been a call, even amongst liberals, for a return to realism. Francis
Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle have
written pieces arguing for less strident democracy promotion, as have Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman. Yale Professor Ian Shapiro’s new book on
liberal realism embodies this trend perfectly, as I gather from an unfavorable
review in the New
Republic. These authors make many reasonable points, but even aside from
the importance of the principle, they neglect the benefits of even marginal
improvements towards liberalism in non-democratic countries and the ability of
consistent and non-hypocritical US
policy in promoting that orientation. The value of their advice comes down to
“be smarter,” but that wouldn’t be difficult for the Bush Administration. In
fact, they seem to be doing this despite themselves. The success of the Bush Administration’s
policies seem to depend on the degree to which it puts other people in charge (e.g. Petraeus and now Gates, neither of whom were close to the administration before they were given enormous responsibility).
I align myself with the likes of Rogen Cohen in lamenting the rise of the reactionary
anti-neo-cons, especially when they are willing to sacrifice liberal
principles, like humanitarian intervention, and begin talking about stability
in the Middle East over democracy promotion. This
reinforces what I have long suspected about realists: since their only motto is
no principle but power, they can justify any action if it leads to an outcome
where America is stronger, and they can criticize any action that does
otherwise; what they are incapable of doing is suggesting what is just, and
what will improve the conditions of humanity, except more American power.
Arch-realist Henry
Kissinger illustrated this flaw in realism recently, when he took the unusual
position of insisting that stability in Iraq
was vital to American interests, but making Iraq into a democracy was incompatible
with making it stable. One would assume that realists such as he, who are relatively indifferent to republican governance,
found fault in overthrowing a tyrannical regime that could be “contained.”
People like him, whose imaginations are sodden by years of textbook amorality (and
cynicism over the collapse of Weimar Germany), are incapable of understanding
that liberal democracy is the greatest cures for international terrorism and domestic
violence, as the respective econometric research of Alan
Krueger and William
Easterly demonstrates.
Aside from international pressure, the National Intelligence
Estimate offers no real explanation as to why Iran
decided to give up its nuclear weapons program, but one theory finds no
coincidence in the fact that the year of abandonment was the year of the
invasion of Iraq.
Though, even if the Iraq War helped steer the Iranians into leaving the
program, it is an inadequate explanation by itself. Iranian domestic politics
are heterogeneous and criticism of the prime minister is open. Because Iran is a weak
autocracy, with some democratic pressures, it is not immune to the reasonable
demands of its citizens, some of which undoubtedly included greater economic
integration in the global marketplace, which would require eliminating the
nuclear weapons program. Threats from the US may have influenced some but
probably hardened the positions of others to give up the program, and so another
possibility strikes me as more plausible. The strongest domestic case for Iran’s
pursuit of nuclear weapons was to deter attack from Saddam Hussein, whose
forces slaughtered roughly one million Iranians. With Saddam expunged, the security
benefits of the program quickly fell below the international political costs,
and the rational was eviscerated.
Of course, neither the U.S. nor Iran would ever have been in
this dangerous state of affairs if not for the realist ambitions that emerged
from John Foster Dulles, the former Secretary of State, and his fervently illiberal
henchmen, who in 1953 overthrew one of the great liberal Persians of the 20th
Century, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
A return to realism, in so far as that means attenuating
democracy promotion in favor of granting succor to dictatorships, would not only
be immoral in principle, but irrational in practice. There is a great deal of
work to be done, and surely there is a need for practical, sensible, and
nuanced policy. Merely organizing elections will not do. The strategic use of
force and diplomacy is essential, but whatever the lesson of Iran’s peaceful
turn away from nuclear weapon’s development, we can now refute the
criticism that the Bush Administration has jeopardized U.S. security vis-a-vis Iran by abandoning realism in favor of democracy promotion in the Middle East.
-Editor