I've been floored by the overall positive reaction to the Iran piece. A few first takes
1) My friend Will Schirano in comments makes the following points:
I think my only criticism would be that you and Ted do not define what it means to "giv[e] up [the] capability to build nukes."
Does that mean that the Iranians are not allowed to enrich uranium? Moreover, does that mean that the Iranians are not allowed to construct heavy water reactors?
[...]
I think the basis of any deal would have to include the cessation of both [heavy water reactors and uranium enrichment facilities] (Natanz and Arak specifically) if we're to be certain that the Iranians would not have the capability to produce a fissionable amount of nuclear material in the future.
These are good points. Ted and I went back and forth on just what, exactly, the contours of "give up the capacity to build nukes" would look like, and decided that to effectively flesh out a plan was beyond the scope (and space permitted) of the article.
We bounced around some pretty strange ideas, including my own plan that if the Iranians were insistent that they wanted uranium enrichment on Iranian soil, we could devise a scheme where the IAEA itself could do the enriching. But Will's keyed on probably the potential deal breaker: that the Iranians would likely want to be in control of the enrichment process themselves, which would--and probably should--be a deal-killer. We're offering a hell of a lot here: they'd need to pony up on their end, too.
2) Praktike weighs in:
I would add at least two points to their argument. First, that America's interest in an understanding with Iran would have to extend beyond the nuclear issue to include regional security cooperation in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as ongoing disputes between Iran and America's Gulf allies such as Bahrain. Second, I would stress that offering an enticing deal publicly would encourage internal debate and undermine the hardliners around Ahmadinejad, which is a good think in my book...
Pretty much total agreement on the second point. As to the first point, if those issues came up during negotiations, it would certainly be a more fruitful atmosphere in which to discuss them, but I'm leery of piling more issues on the table if we're serious about denuclearization. We've seen similar ideas with respect to North Korea--like adding human rights and a cornucopia of other issues to the slate--that I think makes negotiations more difficult, not less. I'm not seeing why simmering disputes with the Gulf states would need to get onto this agenda. An agenda, sure, but I'd feel better getting first things first. I think if we could get a breakthrough on this front, we'd have much better channels of communication for talking about other issues.
3) Finally, my pal Jim Henley offers the following:
I agree with almost everything they write except their conclusion - “Washington needs to make every diplomatic effort to stop Iran from getting a bomb before we start a war with that country” - to this extent: I doubt that it is worth a war to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Logan and Preble implicitly concede that war is a reasonable if not actually necessary response to the possibility of an Iranian nuke.
I’d go further and say, if the United States and Iran can successfully normalize relations, the United States has no interest in keeping Iran from going nuclear at all. I’m talking about a comprehensive normalization such as the Iranians themselves proposed exploring in May 2003:
In the spring of 2003, shortly before [former NSC advisor Flynt Leverett] left government, the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve bilateral differences. The document acknowledged that Iran would have to address concerns about its weapons programs and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. It was presented as having support from all major players in Iran’s power structure, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A conversation [Leverett] had shortly after leaving the government with a senior conservative Iranian official strongly suggested that this was the case. Unfortunately, the administration’s response was to complain that the Swiss diplomats who passed the document from Tehran to Washington were out of line.
If such a deal could be worked out, Iranian nukes would be no scarier than French ones, and less worrisome than the nukes in Pakistan. Nor need we assume it’s too late to make a deal.
First, we tried to remain agnostic on the "what to do next question" in order to be ecumenical. Neither Ted nor I thinks that bombing Iran would be a good idea if the deal fails, but if you put that into the piece, you immediately limit your readership. The people who I'd like most to come around to our position on negotiations are the people who would support military action in the absence of negotiations.
I'm perhaps even less optimistic than Jim about what the likely outcome of bombing would be. Here, I'll source to Lt. Col. Sam Gardiner, war gamer extraordinaire, and the wargame scenario he ran for the Atlantic way back in 2004. Here's the last graf of the piece:
So this is how the war game turned out: with a finding that the next American President must, through bluff and patience, change the actions of a government whose motives he does not understand well, and over which his influence is limited. "After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers," Sam Gardiner said of his exercise. "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."
Mind you, this was 2004. Here's what Gardiner was saying to the WaPo more recently:
At a conference in Berlin, Gardiner outlined a five-day operation that would require 400 "aim points," or targets for individual weapons, at nuclear facilities, at least 75 of which would require penetrating weapons. He also presumed the Pentagon would hit two chemical production plants, medium-range ballistic missile launchers and 14 airfields with sheltered aircraft. Special Operations forces would be required, he said.
Gardiner concluded that a military attack would not work, but said he believes the United States seems to be moving inexorably toward it. "The Bush administration is very close to being left with only the military option," he said.
Contrast that with the bizarre plan of Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, who argued that--wait for it--460 aircraft, 60 of which are stealth, would fly sorties against--wait for it again--more than 1,500 aim points, and, thanks to "a major covert operation...utilizing Iranian exiles and dissident forces trained during the period of diplomacy," the mullahs would scatter and something better would magically appear. (MediaMatters takes issue with McInerney's track record here. I zinged McInerney here.)
The central point here, though, is that people who know this stuff, McInerney notwithstanding, say IT WON'T WORK. Once more, that's IT WON'T WORK. You get a big bloody mess, corpses dragged across al Jazeera, total upheaval across the Muslim world and then a nuclear Iran anyway. Sound good?
Jim also says that "if the United States and Iran can successfully normalize relations, the United States has no interest in keeping Iran from going nuclear at all." I flirted with this position for a while, but I've decided that on balance, all things considered, that Iran not going nuclear is quite preferable to the alternative.
Although I'm broadly sympathetic to Kenneth Waltz's argument that the spread of nuclear weapons is generally stabilizing, not destabilizing, this is not the way--the time or the place--to do it. Waltz's argument hinged on a slow, measured pace of proliferation, and I'm not sure that that would come to pass in this instance. Also, although Iranian nukes would potentially have a moderating impact on Israel's foreign policy, perhaps leading both sides to clarify the contours of a cuttable deal over Palestine, the same nukes would no doubt embolden Iran to nibble further at Israel's peripheral interests, spritzing gasoline on an already hot fire. I agree with Jim that under normalized relations with Iran that the Iranian nukes wouldn't be anything to jump under our desks about, but given our propensity to intervene in the Middle East when things get messy, it'd be better if they didn't get messy, and I think in the short term, Iranian nukes make more messiness more likely.
In the end, too, I'm reminded by Jim's/Kevin Drum's invocation of Iranian overtures to the US, of this fascinating and important 5,000 worder from the WaPo about how Cheney's office spiked negotiations way back in 2002:
Days after Bush declared an "axis of evil," one of its members dispatched an envoy to New York. Javad Zarif, Iran's deputy foreign minister, arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in the first week of February 2002 with a thick sheaf of papers. According to sources involved in the transaction, Zarif passed the papers to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who passed them in turn to Washington.
Neatly arranged inside were photos of 290 men and copies of their travel documents. Iran said they were al Qaeda members, arrested as they tried to cross the rugged border from Afghanistan. Most were Saudi, a fact that two officials said Saudi Arabia's government asked Iran to conceal. All had been expelled to their home countries.
"They did not coordinate with us, but as long as the bad guys were going -- fine," a senior U.S. national security official said.
Diplomats from Tehran and Washington had been meeting quietly all winter in New York and Bonn. They found common interests against the Taliban, Iran's bitter enemy. Iranian envoys notified their U.S. counterparts about the 290 arrests and proposed to cooperate against al Qaeda as well. The U.S. delegation sought instructions from Washington.
The delegation's room to maneuver, however, was limited by a policy guideline set shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
In late November 2001, the State Department's policy planning staff wrote a paper arguing that "we have a real opportunity here" to work more closely with Iran in fighting al Qaeda, according to Flynt Leverett, a career CIA analyst then assigned to State, who is now at the Brookings Institution and has provided advice to Kerry's campaign. Participants in the ensuing interagency debate said the CIA joined the proposal to exchange information and coordinate border sweeps against al Qaeda. Some of the most elusive high-value targets were living in or transiting Iran, including bin Laden's son Saad, al-Adel and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian.
Representatives of Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fought back. Any engagement, they argued, would legitimate Iran and other historic state sponsors of terrorism such as Syria. In the last weeks of 2001, the Deputies Committee adopted what came to be called "Hadley Rules," after deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, who chaired the meeting. The document said the United States would accept tactical information about terrorists from countries on the "state sponsors" list but offer nothing in return. Bush's State of the Union speech the next month linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea as "terrorist allies."
Twice in the coming year, Washington passed requests for Tehran to deliver al Qaeda suspects to the Afghan government. Iran transferred two of the suspects and sought more information about others.
Iran, in turn, asked the United States, among other things, to question four Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. They were suspects in the 1998 slayings of nine Iranian diplomats in Kabul.
Participants said Bush's divided national security team was unable to agree on an answer. Some believe important opportunities were lost.
"I sided with the Langley guys on that," Downing said. "I was willing to make a deal with the devil if we could clip somebody important off or stop an attack."
Talk about your screwed up priorities. All of this leads one to believe that the channels were open from the Iranian side way back when, and we told them to go jump in a lake. Now, we're wondering how we got into the predicament in which we currently find ourselves...
