The Washington Post‘s David Ignatius is always a must read if you want to know some of the foreign policy thinking percolating inside an administration. Today, he writes:
They want to avoid, if possible, a situation that appears to be a Bush vs. Iran confrontation. The administration decided last year to work the nuclear problem through the European Union countries negotiating with Iran — Britain, France and Germany — in part to avoid making America the issue. Although the E.U. negotiations have failed to stop the Iranian nuclear program, administration officials hope to maintain a united front as the issue moves toward the United Nations. A key question for U.S. officials is how to assess Ahmadinejad’s radicalism. Many were surprised by the belligerent tone of his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last September, and worries deepened after his reckless statements denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel’s destruction. The toxic spirit of the 1979 revolution seemed to have returned. An intellectual benchmark in the Iran debate was a briefing given to officials last fall by Jack A. Goldstone, a professor at George Mason University who is an expert on revolutions. He argued that Iran wasn’t conforming to the standard model laid out in Crane Brinton’s famous study, “The Anatomy of Revolution,” which argued that initial upheaval is followed by a period of consolidation and eventual stability. Instead, Ahmadinejad illustrated what Goldstone called “the return of the radicals.” Something similar happened 15 to 20 years after the Russian and Chinese revolutions — with Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s and Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, Goldstone explained. He argued that Iran was undergoing a similar recrudescence of radicalism that, as in China and Russia, would inevitably trigger internal conflict. The gist of Goldstone’s analysis gradually percolated up to Rice, Hadley and others. What has intrigued policymakers is the argument that Ahmadinejad’s extremism will eventually trigger a counterreaction — much as the Cultural Revolution in China led to the pragmatism of Deng Xiaoping. Officials see signs that some Iranian officials — certainly former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and perhaps also the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — are worried by Ahmadinejad’s fulminations. Unless the Iranian president moderates his line, wider splits in the regime are almost inevitable, officials believe. They also predict that his extremism will be increasingly unpopular with the Iranian people, who want to be more connected with the rest of the world rather than more isolated.
Of course, working the Iran problem through the E.U. for as long as we did before moving on to the Security Council has had a downside. It has given Iran more time to complete a workable nuclear weapon if that’s Tehran’s goal. But this gets to the second point that — like Stalin and Mao — “Ahmadinejad’s extremism will eventually trigger a counterreaction.” Are Bush administration officials suggesting that broad U.S. support for pro-democracy Iranian dissidents would be a mistake? That if we are patient more moderate elements like Rafsanjani and Khamenei will push the nutty former mayor of Tehran and his cronies aside? But even if that were to happen, can the U.S. tolerate such a regime armed with nuclear weapons as we did during and after the era of Stalin and Mao? Ignatius’ piece, “Containing Tehran,” appears to add to the confusion on what exactly is U.S. Iran policy.
