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Must we make Iran an enemy?
It has legitimate worries and lots of people willing to do business with us
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
By Dan Simpson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
It is difficult to see why the Obama administration remains on the warpath against Iran.
It follows closely in that regard on the trail of the George W. Bush administration, which included Iran with Iraq and North Korea in its "axis of evil." The George H. W. Bush regime didn't pay much attention to Iran. Ronald Reagan played ball with Iran in the famous Iran-Contra affair, even though, when the ayatollahs took over, they had held American hostages until Reagan came to power in 1981.
First on the Obama administration's bill of particulars against Iran is its development of a nuclear program. Iran claims the program is devoted to producing nuclear energy. This is a credible possibility, given that Iran wants to continue selling its dwindling oil reserves for cash and thus needs to develop alternative sources of energy to fuel its economy. The problem is that the Iranian government has sometimes lied about its nuclear program.
Nonetheless, Iran has signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike U.S. allies India, Israel and Pakistan. It uses Russia as a contractor on some of its nuclear facilities and would probably be prepared to accept increased International Atomic Energy Agency inspection as part of an agreement to get the world, led by the United States, off its back. As it is, Iran uses alleged developments in its nuclear program, which it frequently hypes, as a means of sticking the needle into the United States and the West.
Although the United States maintains that Shiite Iran's Sunni-led neighbors also don't want it to have a nuclear capacity, it is nonetheless the case that to some people in the Middle East and to some Muslims elsewhere, Iran is a hero for pursuing its nuclear program in the face of U.S. opposition.
The United States also objects to Iran assisting Hezbollah, Hamas and other unpleasant actors in the Middle East and worries that it might eventually provide nuclear weapons to such groups. It might make a better argument to say that if Iran were developing its nuclear program under IAEA oversight, consistent with its NPT obligations, free of sanctions and U.S. special forces' harassment, it would not be interested in providing nuclear weapons assistance to the region's bad guys.
The question is how Iran will behave if it is beleaguered by as much of the world as the United States can rally against it, versus how it will behave if it is treated as a serious, responsible adult in the family of nations. This acceptance is undoubtedly important to the Iranian regime, only 31 years after it came to power.
The Obama administration also criticizes Iran for not being democratic. One would have thought that after the American attempt to introduce democracy to Iraq through the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation turned into a debacle that the Obama administration would be embarrassed to keep talking about democracy in the Middle East.
There might also be reason to think that, given the state of democracy among America's other allies in the region -- as examples, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates -- that the Obama administration would be happy to stay quiet about democracy in Iran.
In terms of democracy, states can be ranged from "vigorously democratic" at one end of the spectrum to "flaccidly autocratic" at the other. (The United States itself, looking at the conduct of politics in, say, South Carolina, might not get a perfect score.)
There are serious questions about the depth of democracy in Iran, particularly based on its last presidential elections. On the other hand, to measure the quality of democracy in a Middle Eastern country is, in a way, like asking how well a National Football League team plays baseball. For the Middle East, Iran doesn't do badly at democracy, so that shouldn't be cited by the Obama administration as a reason for pushing regime change there.
Then there is the taking of the American Embassy in Tehran and the imprisonment of 52 Americans in the 1979-1981 post-revolution period. I have no sympathy for the Iranians on that score, particularly since I have friends who were heroic victims of that terrible action.
Nonetheless, the new Iranian regime at that point had recent memories of the United States ousting a previous government in Iran in 1953 by getting rid of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and giving the Shah enhanced power to misgovern the country. It is conceivable that the new government in 1979 was afraid that another such scheme was being cooked up in the American Embassy and that it made sense to head off any such effort by shutting down the place. This doesn't make it acceptable, but it does make it comprehensible. Also, that was 31 years ago, six American presidents ago.
In the general scheme of Middle East politics, it is worth remembering that there was a time when Persian, Shiite Iran was aligned with Hebrew, Jewish Israel against the Arab, Sunni states of that troubled region. If Iran and Israel now neither maintain decent communications nor sometimes cooperate, it is important to remember that this was not always the case, even within the lifetimes of many of today's leaders of the two countries.
For me, another bottom line is that Iran is a nation of business people, as are we Americans, in spite of the bad odor into which some of our own investment houses, banks and corporations have fallen. Based on history, and on Iranians I know and have known, I just don't get the stolid enmity on our part. Are we in that desperate a search for enemies?
Dan Simpson, a former U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com, 412 263-1976). More articles by this author
Must we make Iran an enemy?
