Ken Pollack's solution - Matthew Yglesias blog
The Persian Puzzle
In addition to eating turkey and enjoying my dad's new high-definition television, I spent the Thanksgiving weekend reading Kenneth Pollack's The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America and I'm now ready to lock and load and march to Teheran. Well, not really. And, for those of you concerned about what happened after his last book, neither is Pollack. The vast majority of the The Persian Puzzle is a simple history of US-Iranian relations in the twentieth century, only in the final chapter does it turn into a policy brief. I found the historical material quite helpful, coming at it from a relatively uninformed perspective, and Pollack's position inside the Clinton administration in the 1990s gives him particularly insight into the American side of the equation during that period. For the earlier material I would guess there's probably a better book to read somewhere, but the vast majority of people could probably learn a thing or two from Pollack.
Now on the question of What Is To Be Done?, Pollack takes a quite moderate and non-shocking line. He says you need to think of two clocks ticking in Iran, the regime change clock and the nuclear clock. It appears that the nuclear clock will strike midnight first, and our historical experience is that the United States has very little ability to encourage positive change in Iranian domestic politics and our efforts in this direction often turn out to be counterproductive. So we should focus on the nuclear clock. This means doing three things.
First, it means holding out the offer of a "grand bargain" in which Iran would curb Hezbollah violence and give up on nuclear weapons in exchange for America lifting sanctions, normalizing relations, and leaving Iran out of future "axis of evil" speeches and other geopolitical hit-lists. Presumably we would also start cooperating formally on stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan as we have, from time to time, cooperated in an under-the-table kind of way. Pollack says this would be the best outcome, but he's skeptical that it will work. He claims that this is what the Clinton administration tried to do in the late-1990s, that Iran basically wasn't willing (or as he puts it, "ready") to go for it, and that the correlation of power in Teheran has shifted against such a likelihood. I have some doubts on this score that I'll save for a later post, though I don't think it's crucial, since Pollack agrees that we should try and do this if we can, and I agree that it certainly might not work.
Second, he thinks that the most likely thing to work would be for the US and its allies to get on the same page about creating an incentive structure. Roughly speaking, the current state of play is that the US wants to get the Europeans to threaten more sticks for Iranian misbehavior and Europe wants the US to offer more carrots in exchange for good Iranian behavior. Pollack contends -- no doubts accurately -- that if we and the Europeans committed to doing both together in a credible way that this would probably get Iran to behave better and pave the way for a happy, grand bargainish outcome in the end.
Third, this might not work and Iran might not go nuclear. In this case Pollack says we basically need to learn to live with it, and count on deterrence as our main policy tool. He says (and I think this is right) that the notion of Iran giving a nuclear weapon to Hezbollah or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a of far-fetched scare story, deserving of an explicit deterrence counterthreat, but not something that should keep us up at night. Depending on what Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the little GCC monarchies do, things might all work out fine under this scenario, or else things might go badly.
That said, the big, big problem with this book is that for a work dedicated to explaining "the conflict between Iran and America" it doesn't tell us very much about what the present day content of this conflict is supposed to be. The business with the Shah and with the hostages was a long way in the past. The dispute over nuclear weapons is, in reality, a kind of meta-conflict. The worry isn't really that Iran will do anything notably bad with nuclear weapons, but that a nuclear bomb will strengthen Iran's hand on other fronts. So what's the problem? America's main strategic priority in the region is fighting al-Qaeda. Iran is one of the only countries on other (another prominent one being, ironically, France) that has demonstrated an independent desire to fight al-Qaeda, irrespective of American pressure or lack thereof. Indeed, US-Iranian cooperation on the al-Qaeda front has been stymied twice by American actions, first the "axis of evil" speech and second our refusal to hand over members of the MEK in exchange for Iranian-held members of al-Qaeda. More on this in a separate post, but suffice it to say that the only indication that Iran might cooperate with al-Qaeda is that they might do so in response to US hostility.
This brings us to Hezbollah. Mostly, though, this is more of the same. The thinking is that Hezbollah could attack US interests, but doesn't in practice. This is a weapon meant to be used if it's needed. But like the nuclear bomb and the possibility of a tactical tilt toward al-Qaeda, this is the stuff of meta-conflict. The tools with which the conflict is fought. It's not the stuff the conflict is being fought over. Another side of Hezbollah is part of a genuine conflict. Iran gives money and guns to Hezbollah, which (among other things) shoots at Israel. The US gives money and guns to Israel which (among other things) shoots at Hezbollah. That's a real conflict, but given the level of sturm und drang surrounded US-Iranian relations, seems like rather small potatoes. Since Israel got out of Lebanon, Hezbollah hasn't done very much. Certainly Israel has bigger problems. And America has other things to worry about besides Israel. What's more, if you could put a deal together that resolved the issues between the Israeli government, the settlers, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, it's very hard to see how potential intransigence from Hezbollah could possible derail that.
Last but by no means least you have Iraq. Here US and Iranian interests not only aren't really in conflict, they seem to be exactly the same. America wants to put a bunch of Shiite Islamists formerly backed by Teheran in power and hope for the best. Iran wants to put the Shiite Islamists it used to back in power and hope for the best. You see the occasional piece of breathless reporting about Iranian intelligence agents slipping into Iraq, but of course we've put our share of American intelligence agents in Iraq as well. The issue isn't where you put your agents, but what they're supposed to do. And our services are basically doing the same thing. Now given that the post-January government's two main sponsors will be mortal enemies, this is bound to become problematic, but again it's problematic because of the conflict, its not the cause fo the conflict.
In short, while I don't deny that there's a conflict (for their clearly is one) it seems to be largely a "conflict about nothing" as Jerry Seinfeld would say. Both sides take steps to gain the upper hand in the conflict, which intensifies it and aggravates the other party. Both sides up the rhetorical ante very high from time to time which intensifies the conflicts and aggravates the other party. But the conflict isn't really about anything. Our political systems are, obviously, different but Iran isn't going to impose a Shi'a theocracy in the United States and Iran is not, in fact, any less democratic (even with the reform movement crushed) than any number of Middle Eastern countries with which we have friendly enough relations.
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