By Jubin Afshar
American Chronicle – In the past few weeks a chorus of influential voices in foreign policy circles in the United States and Europe has expressed concern over the perceived “march to war” by the Bush Administration, prompting emphatic appeals for direct dialogue between the US and the world’s "most active state sponsor of terrorism." The call for dialogue with Tehran has come from Sandy Berger, former President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Patrick J. Buchanan, a leading conservative columnist, George Perkovich, a vice-president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Madeline Albright, former President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Senators Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska) and Richard Lugar (R-Indiana), among others.
The Financial Times, the perennial voice for dialogue with Tehran’s mullahs, led off its editorial page on May 15 by declaring that “A grand bargain is still the only solution on Iran.” It claimed, “The opportunity now exists to turn the tables on Tehran: to put forward an offer that recognizes that Iranians have legitimate security concerns while acknowledging that others have so too. Thus a realistic threat that Iran faces isolation in the world should be accompanied by a serious offer to negotiate.”
The question, however, is whether the regime in Iran is willing to negotiate and about what?
The commotion about guaranteeing the tyrants of Iran their security and promising them that nobody wants “regime change” in exchange for their goodwill and cooperation misses the point of what this most serious crisis of the 21st century is about. The argument goes something like this: The US is not supporting negotiations and is implicitly threatening Iran with regime change, has nearly 150,000 troops on Iran’s western and eastern borders, and Tehran has genuine security concerns which is forcing it to pursue nuclear weapons and behaving belligerently. To succeed in changing the Iranian regime’s behavior, the US should engage the Iranian regime directly in a grand bargain to buy its goodwill by promising the regime the security it wants, and getting a well-behaved partner in securing regional stability.
This argument rests on a misunderstanding, or a lack there of, about the nature of the present Iranian regime and fails to draw lessons from the past three decades of Islamic fundamentalist rule in Iran. Is the Iranian regime really pursuing nuclear weapons as an act of self-defense against perceived US threats? Are Ahmadinejad’s continuous threats to other countries and his call for a “global Islamic rule,” a result of Iran’s perceived threats? Is Iranian sponsored terrorism and its spread of fanatical and regressive religious fundamentalism due to some outside impetus?
The past three decades of Islamic fundamentalist rule in Iran have shown that the regime in Iran thrives on confrontation and external threats to suppress all dissent and consolidate internally, precisely because it is incapable of managing a modern, prosperous, open, and democratic system of government.
The regime’s acquisition of nuclear technology, which many suspect is for building nuclear weapons, started in total secrecy in the late 1980s and was uncovered by the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in the summer of 2002.
Tehran’s involvement in Lebanon and its sponsorship of terrorism began in the early 1980s, which make it clear that terrorism has been a major foreign policy instrument for the regime with which it aims to intimidate and blackmail various countries into accepting its terms.
Tehran has openly declared its ambition to be the leader of the “Islamic World,” and to form an “Islamic bloc” to impose the Iranian model of religious government on Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. This “Islamic Caliphate” would be armed with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles to impose its terms on a world that looks on incredulously and seeks to negotiate and bargain with an increasingly confident and belligerent state-sponsor of terrorism.
What does Iran have to negotiate about? The Iranian regime said repeatedly that it is more than willing to negotiate, but only about its own agenda and on its on terms. In the same breath, it vowed over and over never to suspend nuclear enrichment. What it is willing to negotiate about is how the West could help it dominate the region, acquire nuclear surge capability, withdraw from the region, and abandon all talk of spreading democracy to the so-called Islamic dominion.
So herein lies the fallacy of the argument for engagement and negotiations. The Iranian regime says let’s negotiate about how you can save your skin and leave the region safely, rather than about changing our behavior. No change in behavior will come from any such negotiations and the regime will use the time to cross the point of no return in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The second fallacy lies in the fact that engagement has been the modus operandi going all the way back to the Irangate fiasco in mid-1980s, with the Europeans and the United States engaging with Iran one way or another and closing their eyes on the regime’s human rights abuses at home and sponsorship of terrorism abroad. Engagement, therefore, is not a new idea but an old and failed policy that actually resulted in the ascension of Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a sign of hardliners consolidating their position in the Iranian regime. If the threat of military confrontation in the Persian Gulf region looms so large today is a consequence of such appeasement in the past.
The third fallacy is that it sends precisely the wrong signal to a restive and discontent Iranian population which does not support the regime and will not support it on the nuclear issue either.
The world must unite in the face of this new oriental and religious dictatorship and isolate it rather than lend it further legitimacy through futile engagement. The Iranian people despise the regime, and despite the myth of Iranian nationalist sentiments causing a rally round the flag effect over the nuclear issue, will not support this regime in its present confrontational stand. Over 4,000 protest actions in Iran aimed at the regime during the last Iranian year that ended in March prove that there is a deep and wide gap between the Iranian rulers and the Iranian people. The world must recognize this resistance to Islamic fundamentalist rule in Iran and avoid offering the mullahs any more favors by promising it security guarantees. Why should anyone offer to protect this regime from inevitable downfall at the hands of the Iranian people? On the contrary, international pressure on the religious tyranny in Iran should be ratcheted up and the US administration should engage the Iranian Resistance movement and people instead of threatening military action. War is not inevitable as long as appeasement (ie: engagement, negotiations, grand bargains, etc) is avoided.
The best option remains the third option as set out by Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, in her address to the European Parliament in December 2004 and to the Council of Europe in April 2006. “I have come to say that the international community is not required to choose between the nuclear-armed mullahs or a war," she said. "There is a third option: democratic change by the Iranian people and their organized resistance… Making concessions to the mullahs is not the way to avoid war. It would increase the possibility of a war."
The West should heed her advice before it is too late.
Jubin Afshar, is Director of the Middle East Project at Near East Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
