Bush's Choice on Iran

The Washington Post


Bush's Choice on Iran

By Jackson Diehl

Monday, January 30, 2006; Page A17



The debate on Iran is drifting toward the ugly question that the Bush
administration would most like to avoid. That is: Is it preferable
for the United States to live with the consequences of a nuclear-
armed Iran, or with those of a unilateral American military strike
against Iranian nuclear facilities?

President Bush has never answered that question; instead, he and his
State Department have repeatedly called an Iranian bomb "intolerable"
while building a diplomatic coalition that won't tolerate a military
solution. But two of our more principled senators, Republican John
McCain and Democrat Joe Lieberman, have this month faced the Iranian
Choice -- and both endorsed military action. McCain was most direct:
"There is only one thing worse than the United States exercising a
military option," he said on "Face the Nation." "That is a nuclear-
armed Iran."

It's easy to see why the Bush administration prefers ambiguity to
McCain's decisive judgment. After all, both options are terrible, and
everyone can agree that diplomacy is worth a try. Yet Bush and both
parties in Congress ought to be thinking through their own answers to
the Iranian Choice, for two reasons. First, it looks more likely than
not that the United States will, in the end, have to make that
decision; and, second, the answer to the question ought to shape how
the coming diplomatic phase is managed.

One driver of the choice is the ranting of Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad about Israel and the Holocaust -- which, contrary to what
a Western secular sensibility might suggest, is not necessarily a
bluff. As Lieberman put it in his "Face the Nation" appearance a week
ago, "if we should have learned one thing from 9/11 . . . it is that
when somebody says over and over again, as Osama bin Laden did during
the '90s, 'I hate you and give me the chance, I will kill you,' they
may mean it and try to do it." If the West is going to gamble that it
can contain a religious fanatic who possesses nuclear weapons and
vows to wipe Israel from the map, it should do so knowingly, and not
because it failed to provide for the possibility that an extremist
would not respond to conventional diplomacy.

Another decision forcer is that, for all the talk among Iran watchers
about opposition within the regime to Ahmadinejad, there is no
evidence that anyone in Tehran disagrees with his judgment about
negotiations with the West -- which is that Iran has no need to make
a deal. Iranian leaders were universally dismissive of the offer made
last summer by the European Union. There is no indication that any
senior leader or faction favors giving up uranium enrichment, under
any circumstances. Not even the democratic opposition wants it.

So the United States must approach the coming maneuvering in and
outside the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency
board, and any last-minute negotiations in Vienna, Moscow or Tehran,
the way the Iranians probably do: not as an end in itself but as a
prelude to more meaningful action. If the ultimate intent is to
contain, rather than attack, the Iranian nuclear program, then
dilatory and fruitless negotiations -- like those of the past two
years -- are worthy and even desirable. Not only do they slow Iran's
bomb-building but they help to cement a global coalition that might
be able to deter the regime from actually using an eventual weapon
over a long twilight era, Cold War-style.

If this is the choice, then aggressive efforts to support the Iranian
democratic opposition also make sense, since over time the regime
might be undermined from within. Russia and China should be courted.
Brinkmanship -- like interrupting Iranian oil exports, or prompting
Tehran to do so -- is to be avoided, since there is no military
option to fall back on if the mullahs don't blink.

On the other hand, if McCain is right, then the current diplomatic
campaign should be compressed. As in the case of Iraq, the United
Nations and sanctions should be explored just long enough to show
that the United States has tried them. That's because the timeline
for military action is much shorter than that of containment: While
it might not complete work on a weapon for five or even 10 years,
according to most intelligence estimates, Iran will probably pass
what Israel calls the "point of no return" far sooner. After that
point, when Tehran will have acquired all the means it needs to
manufacture a bomb, it would be considerably more difficult to stop
the Iranian program by force. So, if military action is preferable to
containment, then brinkmanship is called for, while promotion of
Iranian democracy, or painstaking cultivation of Russia and China, is
a waste of time.

So what is the Bush administration doing? It is allowing talks to
drag on, and slowly courting Russia and China, but doing next to
nothing to help Iranian democrats; it is drawing up lists of
sanctions that, if imposed, might trigger a crisis, but it is also
laying the groundwork for long-term containment. Perhaps the
president has decided what course he will choose if Iranian uranium
enrichment proceeds in spite of negotiations, U.N. resolutions or
even sanctions. If so, his administration's current tactics show no
sign of it.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company