U.S. policies toward Israel and Iran: what are the linkages? The following is an edited transcript of the sixty-first in a series of Capitol Hill conferences convened by the Middle East Policy Council. The meeting was held Tuesday, July 13, 2010, with Thomas R. Mattair presiding.
Leverett, Hillary Mann ; Indyk, Martin ; Lustick, Ian 等
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT, Senior Research Fellow, Yale University;
coauthor of blog at www.raceforiran.com
The topic today is about linkages between the Arab-Israeli conflict
and the Iranian nuclear issue. The conventional wisdom here in
Washington has long held that Iran, its Syrian ally and their so-called
proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are the ultimate spoilers of Middle
Eastern peace-making efforts. According to this conventional wisdom,
Iran's anti-Israel rhetoric and terrorist attacks by Hamas and
Hezbollah have regularly scuttled what otherwise surely would have been
deemed successful diplomatic initiatives. I say that with some sarcasm.
Given this conventional wisdom, two opposing strategies of linkage
are typically put forward. Both start from the same premise: that Iran
and its so-called proxies can and must be marginalized. The two linkages
really only differ in how to achieve that base goal: marginalizing Iran,
Hamas, Hezbollah and other resistance groups.
The first part of this linkage package, favored by the Obama
administration and articulated recently by National Security Adviser Jim
Jones, holds that trying to achieve Arab-Israeli peace is the key to
Iran and its proxies' regional marginalization. From this
perspective, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement--or, more
accurately, an Israeli-Fatah peace agreement and the creation of a more
prosperous Fatah enclave in the West Bank--would undermine popular
support for Hamas, even in Gaza; marginalize Hamas as an actor in
Palestinian politics; and effectively terminate Iranian influence in
Palestinian affairs, with significant negative consequences for
Iran's regional standing.
Likewise, this linkage holds that the prospect of an Israeli-Syrian
peace agreement could be used to wean Syria away from Iran, thereby
circumscribing Hezbollah's role in Lebanese politics and further
reducing Tehran's regional standing and influence. And of course
from this perspective, progress in the peace process will supposedly
make it easier to form that mythical--and I stress, mythical--diplomatic
constellation to which several U.S. administrations have aspired: a
coalition between Israel and so-called "moderate Arab states"
for the purpose of containing Iran.
The second position of linkage in this argument is one favored
particularly by Israeli Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu, but by others
as well. It posits that weakening Iran's strategic position and
stripping it of its nuclear capabilities--if necessary, by force--is
needed before there can be real progress on Arab-Israeli peace. Frankly,
I see both sets of these linkages as really wrong-headed.
Let's start with why the first piece of the linkages--trying
to achieve Arab-Israeli peace as a way of marginalizing Iran and its
so-called proxies--is wrong. The key point here is this: It is simply
not possible today, if it had ever been possible at some point in the
past, to achieve Israeli Palestinian or Arab-Israeli peace in a matter
that excludes and marginalizes Iran and its regional allies. It's
just not feasible.
Osama Hamdan, the chief of international relations for Hamas, has
said that Israel and the United States have what he calls a
"Cinderella-slipper" approach to Middle Eastern elections.
That is, unless the winner fits a certain set of specific parameters, he
will not be accepted as a legitimate interlocutor. Of course, this is
Hamas's experience. I agree with that, but I would add that Israel
and the United States also have a Cinderella-slipper approach to the
Middle East peace process. That is, only parties that can frontload
their concessions need apply.
This is a profoundly dysfunctional approach to diplomacy. It is
something that Israel's late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin referred
to when he came to understand and explained why Israel needed to
negotiate then with the PLO. Very simple, very basic: you make peace
with your enemies, not with your friends. Policies that deny this basic
reality are bound to fail, and have failed, in terms of both
Arab-Israeli peace making and dealing effectively with Iran.
I will elaborate on this with three basic points. First, though
they are non-state actors, Hamas and Hezbollah have become indispensable
political players in their respective national and regional contexts.
Simply put, these groups win elections, and they win them for the best
possible reasons: they represent unavoidable constituencies with
legitimate grievances. We can't get around that. Under these
circumstances, I challenge anyone to describe in a plausible way how
Israel and the United States can reach sustained peace agreements on
either the Palestinian or the Lebanese and Syrian tracks of the peace
process without these groups' buy-in. These groups should have a
place in the peace process because otherwise the process has no meaning,
except perhaps as a crass motion-without-movement exercise. Those who
continue to depict these groups as entirely nihilistic enterprises with
no real political agenda are either not paying attention or are
deliberately distorting reality for their own political purposes.
My second point deals with Syria and Syrian President Bashar
al-Asad, whom I have met on several occasions. I think that President
Asad wants better relations with the United States and a peace
settlement with Israel, but one that meets well-established Syrian
redlines, such as full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.
However--and I think this point is lost on many in Washington--as
President Asad has made clear in my meetings with him, and as he has
said publicly, Syria's relations with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas
are, at this point in time, not on the table. Syria's relationships
with these actors have moved primarily from being tactical levers for
the Syrian leadership to being increasingly strategic assets.
With the removal of Syrian military forces from Lebanon following
the Hariri assassination in 2005, Hezbollah has become an even more
valuable asset for Syria. It is now, among other things, a key ally for
Damascus in protecting Syrian interests in Lebanon. It also provides,
from their perspective, a critically important and, at this point,
strategic deterrent against Israel. Hamas's control of Gaza and
credibility among Palestinians more broadly also makes it hard to
imagine that Asad would agree to expel [Hamas leader] Khaled Mashal from
Syria as part of a purely bilateral settlement with Israel.
Iran has also proven its strategic value to Syria in recent years.
Iran's religious legitimization of the Asads' Alawi sect is
important, as Syria's secular regime navigates its way through a
religiously charged regional environment. Iranian support was also
critical for Syria in fending off heavy pressure from the United States,
most of Europe and moderate Arab states, particularly Saudi Arabia, in
the wake of the Hariri assassination. In such an uncertain strategic
environment, Asad will continue to value the hedge provided by his close
relationship with Iran. The idea that Asad could be weaned away from
Syria's alliance with Iran is just fanciful.
Third, all that I have laid out so far means that, at this
juncture, Iran is bound to be at least an indirect party to any serious
Middle East peace process. It is counterproductive to see this as an
obstacle to peace. More constructively, it should be seen as a
requirement for progress toward peace.
In fact, Hamas leaders and President Asad have told me in meetings
with him--and he and Khaled Mashal have said publicly--that Iran has
backed their efforts to reach a settlement. Iran publicly endorsed
Syria's participation, for example, in talks Syria had with Israel
that were mediated by Turkey in 2008. They publicly endorsed it, not
once but twice. And Iran does not try to block Hamas's publicly
stated openness to a popularly legitimated two-state outcome to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Now for the more hawkish version of linkage favored by Prime
Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel and others: namely, that rolling back
Iran is a prerequisite for Middle East peace. I believe this vision is
at least as delusional as the suggestion by many in the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq that the road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. I think
it's very similar analytically.
I also think it is delusional to think that, if the Islamic
Republic of Iran disappeared or were effectively contained, there would
be no more problems with the Middle East peace process and that Hamas,
Hezbollah and Syria would simply fall into line with Israeli and
American preferences for organizing the regional order. These actors
have their own agendas and their own preferences for regional diplomacy,
which they will not give up simply because Israeli or U.S. military
aircraft strike nuclear targets in Iran.
It is also important to keep in mind that the increase in
Iran's regional standing and influence in recent years--what
concerns many in Israel, in Arab states and in Washington--has not been
a function of its military capabilities. To this day, the Islamic
Republic has no meaningful capacity to project conventional military
power beyond its borders. That's not how they've done it.
To the extent that Iran's regional standing and influence have
increased in recent years, it is because Tehran has picked winners for
its allies in key regional arenas: Iraq, Lebanon and among the
Palestinians. Whether we like it or not, Iran has sided with groups and
individuals that have been perceived as winners and have actually won
elections in their key regional contexts.
U.S. and Israeli pressure on the Islamic Republic is not going to
undercut Iran's regional influence. In fact, the opposite is true.
Confrontation with Israel and the United States may enhance Iran's
regional standing. I also believe it is delusional to think that concern
about a rising Iranian threat could unite Israel and moderate Arab
states in an alliance under Washington's leadership.
In reality, the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel,
whether we like it or not, is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics,
regardless of what some of their ambassadors may say from time to time.
Even moderate Arab regimes cannot ignore the reality of this profound
dislike among their publics and sustain that kind of cooperation.
Pursuit of an Israeli-moderate-Arab coalition united to contain
Iran is not only delusional. Even more important, it will continue to
leave the Palestinian, Syrian and Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli
conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in freefall, as
they are today. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful
American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and
Hezbollah.
Iran is also not going to take Israeli or U.S. political or even
military pressure without pushing back. And at least some of the ways in
which Tehran will seek to push back are likely to make it even harder
than it is now--that is to say, virtually impossible--to move forward
with Syria's Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Finally, Netanyahu's declaration this weekend after his visit
to Washington that only the threat of U.S. military action can have a
positive impact on Iran's nuclear decision making should be taken
very seriously. It should be taken especially seriously among those of
us in the American Jewish community, because he is on an extremely
dangerous course. Netanyahu's push for eventual U.S. military
action against Iran could do real damage to Israel and the American
Jewish community.
A U.S. attack on Iran would almost certainly result in a broader
confrontation between the United States and Iran. This confrontation
would threaten U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and the strategic
outcomes of our military adventures in both of those countries, spike
the price of oil and hurt an already shaky global economy, and shatter
international perceptions that reckless and dangerous U.S. behavior in
the strategically vital Middle East were somehow peculiar to the George
W. Bush administration.
These eminently foreseeable consequences would have a devastating
impact on America's standing in one of the world's most
important regions. Israel and the pro-Likud community, if not the
broader Jewish community here in the United States, may well be blamed
when the resulting U.S.-Iranian confrontation does severe damage to
American interests because they have led the charge to war. I know
that's a pretty controversial statement, but it is very serious and
important to consider.
We should be considering a more constructive way forward. That
would entail real U.S.-Iranian rapprochement to normalize U.S.-Iranian
relations--what I call "the grand bargain"--along with a
serious negotiation for Arab-Israeli peace that includes Hamas and
Hezbollah in some form.
There is precedent for doing this successfully. It is what Nixon
and Kissinger did with China and Egypt in the early 1970s, striking a
grand bargain with, at the time, these two rising regional powers in a
way that profoundly changed for the better their respective regional
environments. In particular, the U.S. rapprochement with Egypt and its
corollary, the Camp David Accords, have made another generalized
Arab-Israeli war nearly impossible. This is a much better scenario than
if we had continued to try to contain or roll back Egyptian or Chinese
power and influence. Today, from a strategic perspective, bringing Iran,
Hamas and Hezbollah into a diplomatic process and eventually a political
settlement would be at least as consequential.
For those who buy into the demonization of the Islamic Republic and
these groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, it would be useful to remember that
it is only in retrospect that the late Anwar Sadat is viewed as a man of
peace. Throughout much of the 1970s, he was widely seen as an
anti-Israel activist who had launched the 1973 Yore Kippur War, who had
admired Adolf Hitler, and who had collaborated with Nazi Germany against
British forces in Egypt during World War II. These are all much worse
than anything Iran's President Ahmadinejad has done.
But the critical point here is that, without U.S.-Iranian
rapprochement, the United States will not be able to achieve any of its
high-priority goals in the Middle East and, more broadly, Afghanistan.
This would be bad for America's Arab allies and for Israel, which
need credible and effective American leadership in the region to
maintain a stable balance of power, address Syria's threats and
ensure their own safety and survival.
MARTIN INDYK, Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Program,
Brookings Institution
I stand before you as the defender of the conventional wisdom. And
I do so with an amendment to the portrait that Hillary has just given
you of what the conventional wisdom is--actually two amendments. The
first is that I don't agree with General Jones--although I
don't think he's been quoted accurately, at least in the quote
that Hillary gave you--that solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem is
the key to resolving the other conflicts in the region. But I do believe
that it would help. And it would certainly help with the challenge that
we face from Iran.
That's the second amendment to Hillary's portrait of the
conventional wisdom, because she has glossed over certain inconvenient
truths about Iran--that it is seeking to dominate the Middle East; that
it is using its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas to spread its influence into
the Arab heartland of the Middle East; that it is doing its best to
thwart American-led efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and the Arab-Israeli conflict and has been doing so for the last three
decades with a particular purpose in mind: to advance its own influence
in the region.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is a very convenient vehicle for doing
so. One might ask, is it Iran's business to be interfering in this
way? Why would they put out a fatwa on Yasser Arafat's head because
he had decided to make peace with Israel? Why would they have intervened
in Egyptian efforts recently to reconcile Fatah and Hamas so as to
provide a unified Palestinian polity that could make peace with Israel?
Why would they have intervened to prevent Hamas from following through
on that agreement?
Why is it, when any progress seems to be made and I'm talking
very much about the period of the 1990s, when Frank Anderson and Paul
Pillar and I were all working to try to make peace--that Iran does its
best through its terrorist proxies--in those days, Palestine Islamic
Jihad, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian ministry of
intelligence--to use terrorism to destroy our efforts?
Why, when we were making progress between Israel and Syria, would
we suddenly discover Hezbollah launching Katyusha rockets into northern
Israel to disrupt those negotiations? Well, there is a thread that runs
through all of this: the inconvenient truth that Iran has no interest in
making peace with Israel. It says very clearly over and over again that
it wishes to destroy Israel, wishes to wipe it off the map. Those are
the statements we all have heard very clearly emanating from Yehran, in
particular, from its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But beyond the stated objective is the very real strategic
calculation that the Arab-Israeli conflict serves to promote Iran's
agenda in the region and its influence in the Arab heartland of the
Middle East. That is the fundamental inconvenient truth, which cannot be
resolved by some mythical grand bargain on the Egyptian model. Egypt
sought to make peace with Israel. Egypt in the form of President Sadat
evicted Soviet advisers in 1972 with the express purpose of seeking to
build a relationship with the United States and make peace with Israel.
Sadat was very clear about his desire and intention to make peace with
Israel before the 1973 war.
The tragic fact of the matter is that neither Israel nor the United
States took him seriously, and he went to war in order to make peace.
But as soon as he had upended the status quo and taken a position across
the Suez Canal, he turned to making peace with Israel and never turned
back. That is a fundamental difference between the Egyptian model and
the Iranian model. The Iranians have no desire or strategic interest in
seeing a grand bargain struck that involves peace and reconciliation
with Israel in the Middle East.
This is a fundamental reality that we have to find a way to deal
with. How to deal with it is, I think, clear. Hillary has laid out what
she refers to as the conventional strategy for doing so. And I think it
is one that makes sense. On the one hand, we work as hard as possible to
bring together the international community through various mechanisms.
The most recent of these were UN Security Council sanctions designed to
send a message to Iran that its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons in
contravention of its commitments under the [Nuclear] Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT), to which it is a signatory member, will be opposed by the
international community.
Successive UN Security Council resolutions have made that position
very clear. Iran, of course, has refused to listen. The effort to send a
message of unified resolve to Iran was combined last year in an effort
to engage Iran in negotiations over its nuclear program, an effort that
was spurned by Iran. And I don't take seriously the tactical ploy
that Ahmadinejad undertook right before the last UN Security Council
vote on sanctions, via Turkey and Brazil. But the effort by President
Obama, which was a sincere effort, failed. Iranians rejected what was by
all accounts a very reasonable offer to try to deal with Iran's
security concerns, to deal with Iran's professed desire to have a
civilian nuclear program, but to deny it the ability to have a breakout
capacity for nuclear weapons.
Now the effort is to apply more sanctions, not to make war on Iran,
but to bring it back to the negotiating table. That effort to pressure
Iran, to make it see that its interests do not lie in disrupting the
whole nonproliferation regime, has to be, in my mind, combined with an
effort to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Precisely
because Iran uses the Arab-Israeli conflict to expand its influence in
the region, pressure on Iran can indeed be enhanced by a comprehensive
effort to re solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. And yes, that involves
both an effort to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the
establishment of an independent Palestinian state living in peace
alongside the Jewish state of Israel, and it involves an effort to make
peace between Israel and Syria.
Hillary cites some statement that the Iranians supported the Syrian
negotiation with Israel. I don't recall that, but I do recall that
the Syrians and Israelis, through Turkish mediation, were negotiating
not only what Israel would give up--that is, all of the Golan
Heights--in order to achieve peace with Syria, but also what Syria would
give up. The question that Syria had to answer and, I believe, did
answer in those negotiations was what its relationships would be with
Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, were it to make peace with Israel. Why was
this a relevant question? Because Syria has, as Hillary says, strategic
relationships with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas have one particular thing in common. They
all espouse the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, and they do
not support peace making with it. Therefore, this question is reasonably
posed. If Syria intends to make peace with Israel, what will that peace
treaty mean if Syria maintains strategic relations with a country and
its proxies that are determined to destroy the very party that Syria is
making peace with?
It's not an unreasonable question to pose, and the Syrians
considered it a reasonable question that they needed to answer. Their
answer remained secret, but let's just observe that, whenever the
Iranians see that Syria is moving towards peace with Israel, they become
extremely nervous, Ahmadinejad turns up in Damascus, and declarations
are issued of undying love for each other. That's because the
Iranians understand the strategic equation very well. If Syria were to
make peace with Israel, it could not maintain the same relationships
with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. It would have to change those
relationships or Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas would have to make peace with
Israel too. That is, I'm going to submit, an unlikely proposition,
based on the record.
Therefore, if it's not about to happen, Syria would have to
change its strategic relationship, just as Egypt did with the Soviet
Union back in the days when Egypt made peace with Israel. You can't
have it both ways. You can't have a grand bargain if the state you
want to do your bargain with does not share your interests in peace and
stability in the region; seeks rather to counter and thwart
America's standing in the region; opposes and does its best to
subvert America's allies in the region (that is, our Arab friends);
proposes the destruction of Israel; and does its best to support those
who pursue violence and promote terrorism against it. You can't
have a grand bargain with that kind of state.
Therefore, it is, I believe, far more effective to try to resolve
the conflict between Israel and the Arab states and the Palestinians and
to try to find a way to thereby isolate Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas and
convince them that violence, terrorism, conflict and destruction, and
the abrogation of international obligation, do not achieve a more
stable, peaceful and prosperous order for anybody in the Middle East,
including the people they purport to represent.
IAN LUSTICK, Professor of Political Science, University of
Pennsylvania
There is hysteria in Israel regarding the prospect of Iranian
nuclear-weapons capability, and the central question I want to ask today
is, why? Not even Israeli security experts argue that Iran would ever
use a nuclear weapon against Israel or that there is even the threat of
that. So where is this hysteria coming from, and what can we learn by
understanding where it's coming from?
It's a hysteria that has to do not only with the possibility
of Iranian nuclear weapons, but even the possibility of Iran's
nearing the threshold of having nuclear weapons. It's not necessary
to spend very much time to illustrate just how hysterical much of
Israeli public opinion and many of the statements of the Israeli
leadership are in this regard. Last year, a poll by David Menashri of
the Iran center at Tel Aviv University reported as follows: 51 percent
of Israeli Jews responding said they desired an immediate Israeli
military attack on Iran. That is, absent any nuclear weapons,
immediately, they should be attacked. That's 51 percent. The poll
also reported that 70 percent of Israeli Jews said they would not
consider emigrating if Iran got the bomb. That's an odd way to
report a finding--how many would not consider emigrating. So there is
deep fear.
Almost every decision that Israel makes about Gaza, about the aid
flotilla, about Hamas, about the negotiations in general, is justified
by references to Iran. Netanyahu's recent interviews in the United
States with Larry King and elsewhere evinced this. News in Israel is not
a politician saying that this is the 1930s, that Iran is Nazi Germany in
1938, that Ahmadinejad is Hitler. That's not news; it happens all
the time.
What's news is Tzipi Livni actually saying, maybe a Holocaust
is not around the corner. Maybe Israel of 2010, to quote her, is not the
Jews of Europe in 1939. That's news. It's instructive to
consider the effect, when we're looking at a hysteria of this type
about a country that might be about to cross a nuclear threshold, that
it did have a massive effect in at least two other cases. One gripped
the Soviet leadership in the mid-1960s, when another country in the
Middle East whose name starts with "I" was believed to be
about to cross the nuclear threshold.
Of course, that's Israel. And a fantastic book by Isabella
Ginor and Gideon Remez, Foxbats over Dimona, used newly released
documents and amazing research techniques to document the fact that the
Soviets were egging the Arabs on to provoke Israel into a war that they
could exploit to try to take out the budding nuclear capabilities at
Dimona. Hence, the unprecedented deployment of Foxbats in reconnaissance
missions over Dimona prior to the 1967 war. I recommend that book to
show you the effects of this sort of hysteria, or, if you don't
want to use the word "hysteria," the effects of a calculation
that another country is about to cross the nuclear threshold, to get
weapons of mass destruction. It may have been a very powerful factor in
producing the Six-Day War. I believe that it was in the month prior to
the '67 war that Israel itself finally put weapons together in
anticipation of that conflict. More recently, as was already mentioned,
we can remember the hysteria that gripped the United States about
whether weapons of mass destruction were in fact in the hands of Saddam
Hussein--which precipitated what? A gigantic American war in the Middle
East.
So let's think what whipping up hysteria about the possible
possession of nuclear weapons by a Muslim or a non-Muslim country in the
Middle East could do. Let's look at the question of what drives
this. Certainly there is vicious, calculated and largely effective
rhetoric coming out of Tehran, and we've heard references to it. I
don't put much stock in it as a signal of intentions to carry out
attacks. As was said, Iran has never been very good at projecting
conventional military power outside its borders. But it is effective in
pushing Israel's buttons. Ahmadinejad is brilliant at that. I can
give you very good examples of how he calculatedly does this for his own
interests. But these statements about the Holocaust, about Israel's
erasure from the map and so on, do sharpen feelings of fear, angst and
hysteria in Israel on this issue. But that hysteria has many sources:
ideological, historical, policy-oriented,
national-political-cultural-oriented and psychological.
I want to briefly go over some of those sources so we can see how
powerful these feelings are in Israel and what they could be producing.
On its most obvious level, the obsession with Iran, especially by
Netanyahu and his government, is actually very simple and very familiar
as a calculated distraction from what it does not want the United States
and the world to pay attention to.
This is just one more ride on the peace-process carousel: a
not-so-merry-go-round of endless Israeli delays, promises, backtracking
from promises, sabotaging of apparent breakthroughs, clarifications of
their position, embarrassments of mediators, retreats from substance to
confidence-building measures, a new terrorist attack, rediscussion of
the implementation of the promised confidence-building measures rather
than the actual confidence-building measures, a new election,
abandonment of the most recently celebrated framework--which began with
much excitement two years ago--and the resuscitation perhaps of a much
older framework. And the merry-go-round continues.
This "Iran is Nazi Germany" gambit involves the Israeli
government in a portrayal of Iran as, ironically, "the Great
Satan" in an effort to find some way to position Israel as a
country within the world community facing an enemy, rather than as the
enemy of the world community which, in terms of perceptions, is its
current fate. I'm going to tell a little story that can communicate
in one medium-quality joke more about Israeli policy than you can get
from volumes of reading. It's a variation of the classic
"Galut Jew" story in which the really clever Galut--that is, a
Jew living in the diaspora--outsmarts the anti-Semites. Israelis have
often commented on Zionism's incomplete success with the idea that,
although you can take the Jew out of the Galut, you can never take the
Galut out of the Jew. So this story about a Galut Jew is actually a
story about Israeli right-wing governments, especially.
It's about a poretz (landlord) and a Jew. In Central and
Eastern Europe, they used to use Jews as intermediaries--tax collectors,
enforcers, administrators and so on. This poretz in Poland gets very
angry at his Jew and threatens to kill him. The Jew is desperate. He
says, no, no, don't kill me; I've got a great idea.
What's that, Jew? You just give me a year and a bear and I will
teach the bear to talk. What? Nobody can teach a bear to talk, but
anyway, what good is that? Kill him! No, wait a minute. With a talking
bear, you'll make a fortune. So the poretz thinks about it and
says, okay, I'll give you one year, but if that bear's not
talking, you're a dead man. The Jew goes home. His wife says, what
are you, crazy? You can't teach a bear to talk. The poretz will
kill you. The husband says, maybe I can teach the bear to talk. Maybe I
can't teach the bear to talk. But many things can happen in a year.
Maybe the poretz will die. Maybe the bear will die.
That's a fundamental Israeli policy when it comes to the
Arab-Israeli conflict whenever a right-wing government is in power, and
often when a non-right-wing government is in power. And it's the
current policy. It's just that the distraction du jour is Iran. All
of them have some substance, and this has some substance also. So
that's the political source of the hysteria. It's actually a
calculated distraction.
But there are other, deeper sources. Every ideology is a
combination of a theory and an imperative to action. So when you
challenge the theory behind an ideology, you are challenging it.
Zionism's theory of its eventual success in the Middle East
imagined that Jews were the vanguard of Western civilization in the
region and that Jewish mastery of Western technology would allow it to
force the Middle East to accept a Jewish state until the Middle East
followed Israel's example, became Westernized, highly technological
and democratic. It was all part of one process: peace, democracy,
technology.
The Middle East would develop in Israel's image; that's
how Zionism would succeed. But an Iranian bomb, an Iranian nuclear
capacity, would show that you don't have to be Westernized. You can
actually be Islamic. You don't even have to be democratic to master
nuclear technology. So the future of the Middle East is not necessarily
democratic or Western. In other words--and this is very threatening to
Zionism--the Middle East will not be in Israel's image.
Another source of this hysteria is Israel's particular
historical relationship with Iran, well-discussed in a wonderful book,
Iranophobia, by the Israeli scholar Haggai Ram. When the shah--known as,
you may recall, the Light of the Aryans--was emperor, his Pahlavi
dynasty was put forward as a revival of the ancient Achaemenid dynasty.
It was a Persian and secular, pre-Islamic political formula. The
spectacular rise of Iran under the shah was reassuring to Zionism. An
ancient Middle Eastern people could reconstitute itself by using ancient
myths as legitimizing formulas, even in the modern Middle East, to
become secular and modern. Israel famously figured Iran as the core of
its peripheral strategy and had close economic and security ties with
the shah's regime. The sudden and complete disappearance of that
regime was a shock to Israel, suggesting that the deep, volcanic process
in the Middle East might not tolerate this kind of revival of an
ancient, secular idea in the modern Middle East--not from the ancient
Persians and perhaps not from the ancient Jews or Israelites either.
In general, Zionism has been based, since the 1920s, in its
relationship with the Arabs, on the theory of the "Iron Wall,"
a theory that requires Israel and Zionism to have the ability to win
decisively with the unilateral use of force in encounters with Arab and
Muslim opponents. The idea is to teach Arabs, over decades, through a
series of defeats, that there is no hope of destroying Israel. They will
have to accept the reality of it. It used to be that the Iron Wall
theory said, you don't have to accept as correct that we should be
here, only that we can't be destroyed. Now, the Israeli government
actually takes the position that you have to positively say that this is
the homeland of the Jewish people; it's a Jewish state. That's
a retreat from this strategy and a very important one. But that's
been the fundamental basis of the strategy: the ability to use
unilateral force at will in the region. The problem with nuclear power
in the hands of Iran is that Israel could not be confident it could do
that, because all of a sudden, you don't know when a use of force
will escalate to the nuclear level. It makes you think many times, not
just twice, when nuclear weapons are in the zone of consideration of a
policy that you're thinking of implementing.
Best reports suggest that Israel, of course, has hundreds of
sophisticated nuclear weapons and a highly capable delivery system. But
the effect of what I've been discussing about Iranian nuclear
capacity is not whether they get the bomb, but whether they would want
what Israel has had since the mid-'60s: a non-stated,
non-documented, deniable--with some plausibility--capacity. In other
words, they would get nuclear ambiguity. Obviously, nobody's going
to believe that they have as much capability as the Israelis, but
ambiguity is what they are trying to get, and that is what I believe
they will get. That will be enough to interfere with Israel's
confidence that force can be used unilaterally without risking a nuclear
conflagration.
This opacity policy that Israel has pursued is another thing that
produces hysteria in Israel. Nuclear weapons, if you read Israeli
politics closely--and you have to do it very closely because almost
everything that has to do with nuclear weapons is censored or coded in
language that requires you to know Israeli society extremely well to
follow--is the ultimate hot-button issue. Anything related to
Israel's nuclear capacity triggers censorship, nervousness,
emergency procedures, extravagant behavior and fear, because the idea is
deeply embedded in Israel that one wrong move could doom the entire
enterprise. So Israel cherishes this opacity policy, famously formulated
as "we will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the
Middle East." And then sometimes it says, "and we won't
be the second either," a very ambiguous, Alice in Wonderland sort
of statement.
This is a status whereby Israel has weapons, everybody knows it,
but it can be outside of the NPT and IAEA [International Atomic Energy
Agency] regime and still be treated by the United States, in terms of
aid, as if it does not have nuclear weapons. The United States
couldn't be giving aid to Israel if it were outside the NPT and we
agreed that they had nuclear weapons.
Israel has the best of three different worlds here. It achieved
this "don't ask, don't tell" status with enormous
dedication and difficulty. That is another thing that is put at risk by
the Iranian move, because Iran is trying to do the same thing, which
then pushes analysts and policy makers to start to approach the Iranian
problem. And Iran says, well, if you're going to treat us this way,
why don't you treat all states this way? Larry King asked
Netanyahu, "Why should Iran not be able to have the same thing
Israel does?" Israeli nuclear analysts, have pointed to this
argument as itself a serious danger to Israel's nuclear status.
Therefore, Israel is afraid it will be forced into this scary
situation of having to either give up nuclear weapons or go public with
its capacity, with unpredictable consequences--not because of a fear
that Iran will use nuclear weapons, but because Iran is doing exactly
what Israel did in developing an opacity that it's being told is
unacceptable.
Finally, we have the Holocaust trauma. I recommend highly a book by
Avraham Burg--The Defeat of Hitler in Hebrew, The Holocaust Is Over in
English translation--in which he goes into enormous and brilliant detail
about the saturation of Israeli life and psychology with the Holocaust
and memorializations of the Holocaust that actually inflict constant
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on most Jews, but especially
Israeli Jews. You can see this in "Waltz with Bashir," by the
way, if you realize what that movie is actually about. "Waltz with
Bashir" is the Hebrew name of it. "Valtz," of course,
sounds German to you, because there's no W in Hebrew. "Waltz
with Bashir" means doing something German with Bashir. That's
what the movie is about.
If you realize that all of Israeli culture and politics is somewhat
permeated by these images of the Holocaust, you can understand how
Ahmadinejad is able to push those buttons so easily and produce
reactions in Israel that serve his interest. It's a kind of folie h
deux between the right-wing government in Israel and the clerics in
Tehran, each using the other's distorted images of themselves to
reinforce their own beliefs and protect themselves against reality.
The Holocaust imagery that comes out of Iran--not that they deny
the Holocaust, but are even asking questions about it, combined with the
idea of nuclear weapons--puts Israeli elites with children that they
could send abroad into intolerable situations. They have nightmares that
they won't be able to protect their children. It could happen in a
split-second. They're being told by their elites that another
Holocaust is around the corner. Then what do you do? You send your
children abroad. There is a real fear that living in a Middle East that
is multipolar, that has an ambiguous Iranian nuclear capacity, could
encourage even more significant levels of elite emigration. You send
part of your business abroad; one kid goes abroad--all of these kinds of
tactics.
What is the major reality that these two elites are hiding
themselves from? One big one is, of course, the United States. What can
we learn from this analysis to clarify the opportunities for U.S.
foreign policy in this domain? Israel developed nukes out of a desperate
sense of existential dread and distrust and a need for security--that
the Zionist project of the Jewish state, what's called the third
commonwealth, the third temple, would not be destroyed as the first two
were. The men who lead the Islamic Republic of Iran have a similarly
intense and existential commitment to preserve their regime and the
legacy of the Islamic revolution, despite encirclement.
Here is where I would disagree with some of what Martin said,
though I agree with a good deal of it. The interpretation of Iran as
thrusting aggressively to dominate the region is a less efficient way to
understand what it's doing than Iran as an encircled state
desperately trying to prevent itself from being overthrown by sworn
enemies who have invaded countries all around it. And everyone knows
that, if you get some kind of nuclear device, you can claim you're
not going to be invaded. Think North Korea; think Iraq. What was the
difference? Think Iran, for that matter. That's, of course,
Israel's argument for why it needs nuclear weapons.
So both regimes had similarly intense and existential reasons for
developing nuclear weapons. And nothing the United States or Israel does
is going to stop the Iranians from developing a nuclear capacity in this
opaque way that I've been arguing. It doesn't matter whether
there's an Arab-Israeli peace or not. It's just not going to
happen. We are going to see an Iran with a capacity that is a little
more opaque than Israel's, but it's going to be clear enough
to be policy-relevant and to have some of the effects I've been
talking about. The regime will simply not be deflected from this
objective, just as Israel was not deflected--not by America, not by
anyone else.
The many sources of Israeli anxiety, fear and hysteria include,
especially at the elite level, as I've argued, a strong dose of
exaggeration for political effect. Because of that, U.S. attempts,
whether clumsy or subtle, to try to trade U.S. pressure on Iran for
Israeli concessions towards the Palestinians won't work. Netanyahu
knows he's exaggerating. He's not going to say, "Oh,
you're going to put real sanctions on Iran. You're going to
maybe prevent them from having nuclear weapons. Sure, we'll get out
of the West Bank." It never will happen. They don't take
themselves that seriously. This is for foreign consumption.
Now, although the United States cannot stop Iran from establishing
an ambiguous nuclear-weapons posture, it can and must begin managing the
results of that development to prevent accelerated proliferation,
accidents, wars and instability, and further damage to its interests in
Iraq and Afghanistan and to its counterterror efforts. It may seem that
this could be accomplished without an Israeli-Palestinian settlement if
the United States could credibly sponsor a nuclear-weapons and
nuclear-power regime for the region that treats all countries equally.
But Israel could participate in such a scheme only if its nuclear
capacity were renounced or made public and placed under the
international nuclear-weapons and nuclear-power regimes.
Of course, if Iran introduced weapons into the Middle East, then
Israel would no longer be the first to introduce them. If it did so,
though, it would be the second. This gives rise to some issues. Israeli
compliance with this idea is highly implausible in the absence of
American or NATO security guarantees, that is, American-extended
deterrence with tripwire U.S. troops in Israel. This cannot happen
unless the borders of Israel that are being guaranteed by the American
deterrent do not include the West Bank--in other words, if there is a
real viable Palestinian state next to it. We know from deterrence
theory, there is no way the United States could credibly extend a
nuclear umbrella over a country that includes things we don't think
it should have.
The bottom line is that, as Iran passes the nuclear-weapons
threshold camouflaged a la Israel or publicly a la India or Pakistan,
the United States will be cross-pressured to make an extremely difficult
choice. The choice will be framed by its need for Iranian cooperation in
Afghanistan and Iraq, its wider concerns in the region and the domestic
political heat that will result from any interest-driven policy toward
the Arab-Israeli conflict. The United States will either dissociate
itself in an unprecedented way from Israeli governments, allowing that
country to come to terms on its own with a multi-polar Middle East by
achieving at best a kind of regional hudna [truce], or the United States
will combine political pressure on Israel and partnership with it to
rescue the two-state solution from the dustbin of history, to which it
is otherwise being consigned.
PAUL PILLAR, Chief National Intelligence Officer, Near East and
South Asia, National Intelligence Council (2000-05)
I am an old college debater, and this started to sound like a
college debate with the first affirmative and the first negative. I am
going to get out of that mode and, as the clean-up hitter, try to put
some of this into perspective. In reflecting on the question of linkages
and U.S. policy toward Israel and Iran, I think there are three
different levels at which that question can be addressed. The one that,
whether we like it or not, perhaps matters most in shaping U.S. policies
in the Middle East is the political constraint that is imposed on the
making of U.S. policy toward Iran. It is imposed by strong domestic
political support for Israel or, more specifically, for a particular
conception of Israeli interests and particular Israeli policies, mainly
those associated with the Israeli political right.
That political interest has had a very strong constraining
influence on U.S. policies in the Middle East, particularly toward
Israel itself, of course. But the point I am making here is, it has a
very strong constraining influence on anything that the Obama
administration or anyone else making U.S. policy can realistically do
with regard to policy on Iran. Because this conception of Israeli
interests has singled out Iran and, in particular, the Iranian nuclear
threat as the overriding threat to what are seen as Israel's
interests, that is an area where the constraints have been at least as
strong as anywhere else.
I might add that that view does not, in my judgment, reflect a
cogent analysis of likely Iranian decision making. We have heard so
often from different quarters the idea of irrational Iranians in Tehran
who cannot be trusted to be part of a deterrent relationship. And
somehow this seems to assume that, when one of the parties to a
relationship wears a beard and a turban, the principles of deterrence
somehow get repealed.
Iran's record has not shown itself to be suicidal. And the
view of Iranian irrationality does not explain why this regime should be
any different from other hostile regimes that we have had to deal with
when it comes to nuclear weapons. Of course, the first one we had to
deal with was the Soviet Union of Stalin, one of the most bloodthirsty
tyrants in modern history. Then we had to deal with China, when it got
the nuclear weapon in 1964. You may recall that at that time, Mao Zedong
said, a nuclear war wouldn't really be all that bad because
we've got more Chinese than they've got Westerners, after the
radioactive dust settled, there would be more of us than them. That
scared me a lot more than anything I hear coming out of Iran.
But we have lived in a deterrent relationship, and so have others,
with the likes of the Soviet Union and the Chinese. Whether it makes
sense or not, the notion that deterrence would not be possible with Iran
is a strong political constraint, as I say, on U.S. policy making on
Iran. It is one of the reasons for the extremely narrow fixation on the
Iranian nuclear issue to the exclusion of so much else, even to the
exclusion of much having to do with Iran.
More broadly, it constrains the administration of the day from any
policy departures that could be interpreted or depicted by one's
political opponents as going soft on Tehran or, even worse, making nice
with Tehran. I think this becomes all the more a major factor, given
what the political pundits tell us about the prospects heading into the
midterm elections this fall, in which the governing party faces the
prospect of losing control of the House of Representatives and so on.
A second level for looking at this question is one that Ian has
just finished talking about at some length: U.S. management of its
relationship with Israel. The backdrop to this is the Israeli fixation
or--I think Ian's word was quite correct--hysteria over the issue
of the Iranian nuclear program. For the reasons he described, it is a
hysteria that goes well beyond the Netanyahu government, although I
agree with him that that government has skillfully and tactically used
the issue to distract attention from other things. But it is a much
broader, strongly and understandably felt, deep fear and concern about
this particular problem, one that cuts across the Israeli political
spectrum.
I would add only a couple of observations to what Ian talked about.
One, given the hysteria in Israel, it is not feasible to talk, as many
have done, about U.S. and Israeli officials coming to a common strategic
frame of reference as to how to handle this issue. There was a lot of
talk when Netanyahu was here that this ought to be one of the key
objectives of the talks. I don't see how it can be, unless U.S.
perspectives become as hysterical as those of the Israelis. And I
don't think that would be sound U.S. policy.
The main goal here for the United States is to ward off the danger
of an Israeli military strike on Iran. Resorting to military force in
this mode either by Israel or by the United States, which Netanyahu
seemed to be encouraging, would be--for reasons that I think Hillary
touched on earlier--a disaster for U.S. foreign-policy interests in the
Middle East.
The third level is the one where we foreign-policy wonks like to
think we usually dwell: that is, not just politics in Washington or
emotions in Israel, but rather in the international relations of the
Middle East and the diplomatic and strategic dynamics involved there. I
think there are several dynamics to bear in mind. One is the effect of
issues involving Israel, especially Israel's conflict with
Palestinians, on Iranian regional influence and, more specifically, on
the influence, both domestically and regionally, of Iranian hardliners.
There is a very calculated political reason why Ahmadinejad spews
that execrable anti-Israeli invective. It sells. It resonates with a lot
of his intended audience, both inside Iran and elsewhere in the Middle
East. If it didn't, he wouldn't be spewing it. And let us not
confuse rhetoric with reality or propaganda with policy. The Iranian
leadership is smart enough to know it is not going to wipe Israel off
the map. Even if it did somehow do that, it would thereby deprive itself
of one of its main points of leverage for precisely this kind of
propaganda.
This means that anything Israel does or fails to do with regard to
the occupied territories and the peace process contributes to that
influence and to those Iranian propaganda opportunities. In saying this,
I urge you to avoid the influence of the absolutist straw-man argument
one hears so often: that if the problems in the Middle East cannot be
solely attributed to something Israel is doing, then Israeli actions
don't contribute to them at all. Here they clearly do contribute.
There are more specific forms of influence. I would disagree a
little bit with two of my copanelists with regard to Iran's
relationship with the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah. Hamas has no
particular reason to want to be a client of Iran. We are talking about a
bunch of largely Sunni Muslims who are focused on political power over
Palestinians. To the extent that Hamas is subject to isolation and
strangulation, it will take help wherever it can get it. One of those
sources of help has been Iran, but this is not inherent to what Hamas is
all about.
I would emphasize that we shouldn't talk about the two
"H" groups as if they were twins. Hezbollah clearly is an
organization that began life as a creature of Iran and has been a
long-time client of Iran. But even here, now that Hezbollah has
established itself as a force in its own right in Lebanese and Middle
Eastern politics in the way it has over the last several years, it is
not solely a creature of Iran. There are greater and lesser degrees to
which that relationship can be tighter or looser. And I would just add
also that the recent death of Sheikh Fadlallah makes the issue all the
more germane. He seemed to have become, at least in his later years,
representative of an alternative view, a person who was highly respected
and opposed the whole Iranian notion of velayat-e faqih [rule by an
Islamic jurist].
A related dynamic--and here I would agree with many of the comments
that Martin made--is how Israeli-related problems, particularly as they
relate to the conflict with the Palestinians, complicate U.S. efforts to
counter Iranian influence or to counter other Iranian programs and
actions, including the nuclear program. Because of the close U.S.
association with Israel, which is perceived to be even closer than it
really is, the United States, for better or worse, fairly or unfairly,
does share in much of the opprobrium that comes Israel's way
because of Israeli actions or inaction in the Middle East.
This is a complication in trying to forge coalitions of the willing
to contain, confront, influence or constrain Iran. This is especially
so, I would suggest, on the nuclear issue, given that the objective of
preventing an Iranian nuke, if we achieve that objective, would mean
preserving the Israeli nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Ian did get
into this, of course, in his comments, but until then, it had been an
elephant in the room. The Israeli nuclear arsenal by its very existence
weakens a lot of arguments involved in efforts to forestall an Iranian
nuke.
This includes the argument that the introduction of nuclear weapons
in the region would immediately set off a daisy chain of further
proliferation. It certainly lends credibility to the view--whether
justified or true or not--that what is really involved here is not a
problem of nuclear weapons, but rather that some people just like some
regimes more than others. And the Iranian regime is one that we
don't like.
There are a couple of longer-term dynamics that we need to worry
about as well. One is the question of how different U.S. policies toward
Iran would affect Iranian politics, policies and actions, including
actions that would affect Israeli interests. This is too big a topic to
explore in detail here, including what all the ramifications would be if
U.S. policy toward Iran were different from what it is right now--if it
were, for example, more of an engagement policy such as Hillary has
argued for.
I will just make a couple of comments on this. One, it is hard to
think of any way in which an alternative U.S. posture that was less
confrontational and more pro-engagement would make things any worse as
far as the Iranian posture towards Israel was concerned. I think it is
easier to think of ways in which it could well make it better by
weakening the arguments of the Iranian hardliners, who depend so much on
the specter of hostility from the outside world, especially from the
United States. The final dynamic, and this really is a long-term one,
has to do with what happens if Iran does get a nuclear weapon. Then the
prime objective becomes one of encouraging, in every way we can, a
relationship of stable deterrence between what would then be the two
nuclear powers of the Middle East: Iran and Israel. The danger here is
not some bolt-out-of-the-blue Iranian nuclear strike against Israel. As
Ian pointed out, Israel has a three-decade head-start, with a far, far
greater nuclear capability than anything Iran can get in the foreseeable
future.
But there are other ways in which a deterrence relationship can be
more or less stable. This is something that Cold War theorists and
strategists thought a lot about with regard to the U.S.-Soviet
relationship. There are lessons to be learned primarily from that
relationship and, more recently, from the Indo-Pakistani relationship,
two other relative newcomers that have had to find ways to make their
nuclear relationship more stable. There are things the United States can
do by way of teaching and encouraging the two sides on such matters as
nuclear posture that discourage first strikes and ensure a second-strike
capability, lessons that really go back to the U.S.-Soviet Cold War
equation that could be just as applicable to an Iranian-Israeli
relationship.
I will close by noting that in looking ahead at how that kind of
relationship might work, I am not writing off as a lost cause that Iran
might or could stop short of having a nuclear weapon. I think we are
talking about decisions in Tehran not yet made. But it is something we
need to think about.
THOMAS MATTAIR: Executive Director, Middle East Policy Council, and
associate editor, Middle East Policy; author, Global Security
Watch--Iran: A Reference Handbook
Hillary, you are arguing that we cannot achieve objectives like
Arab-Israeli peace without a cooperative relationship with Iran. But you
did say that Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria are independent actors. So, if a
fair deal were offered that was in the interest of Hamas, Hezbollah and
Syria, why would they not be able to accept that, even if Iran were not
part of the negotiating structure?
MS. MANN LEVERETT: At this point, Iran needs to be at least an
indirect party to a negotiated resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The Iranians would not stand in the way of the red lines that Syria,
Hamas and Hezbollah have all laid out for how they want to see a
resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict go forward. The problem is with
how diplomacy was structured, particularly in the 1990s, which, let us
recall, was a failure. This was particularly because it was structured
as people are trying to structure it today, according to the
conventional wisdom as I laid out, as a process that is intended to
marginalize particular parties: Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. I agree with
Paul. It is a poor shorthand, because these are the critical relevant
players that would need to be involved. A process that is intended to
marginalize those players will predictably, as it did in the 1990s,
elicit their opposition. They will oppose, they have opposed, and did
oppose in the 1990s, a process that was intended to leave them out.
They have all said they would participate in a process that
includes them, whether it is Syria participating in indirect talks
mediated by Turkey, or Hamas agreeing to a long-term ceasefire or a
popularly legitimated resolution of the conflict. Each of these parties
has put out prospects for being willing to participate in a process.
What they will not participate in is a process that is intended to leave
them out, to marginalize them and to weaken them. That is what we had in
the 1990s. That is what, unfortunately, the Obama administration is
bringing back: that failed peace process from the 1990s until today; the
idea that somehow if we work harder or are more well-intentioned or
whatever, it is going to turn out some other way. We have precedent for
how it turned out.
This does not mean that Iran would be the party sitting across the
table from the Israelis or sitting hand in hand with the Palestinians.
But it does mean a recognition that the Iranians are at least an
indirect party here. And a process that is structured to weaken them
regionally will, at a minimum, elicit their opposition. It has happened
before. It will happen again. If we can structure a process that
includes parties Iran supports and is not structured to weaken
Iran's influence, but recognizes Iran's regional role, we have
a much better chance at a constructive outcome.
Again, look back at what we did with Egypt or even with China. The
United States and China didn't agree to agree to everything in
their grand bargain. They had many contentious issues, which they had to
essentially agree to disagree about, foremost of which was Taiwan. It is
not correct to say that parties can only agree to a grand bargain, can
only resolve their differences, if they agree to everything. That is not
historically accurate. It is certainly not what the United States did
with China.
If you go back to the case of Egypt, the critical piece there was
the rapprochement between the United States and Egypt. The fact that we
didn't take it seriously then and Sadat had to go to war in
1973--in retrospect, we can excuse that. It only killed a couple of
thousand Israelis. We can excuse that because, at the end of the day,
Sadat was able to come to terms with the United States and make peace
with Israel. Is that what is being posited that needs to happen today,
that the Iranians would somehow have to enter into a confrontation with
the United States or with the Israelis for us to take them seriously as
a regional player?
It is not that we have to agree with them. It is that we have to
relate to them seriously as a regional player, to take their interests
into account. The question arises of, why they would oppose Arab-Israeli
peacemaking. What business is it of theirs? It is their business when
there continues to be essentially an active conflict between the United
States and Iran. Iran is going to look at that in zero-sum terms. We
need to change that equation. That is what worked with Egypt. That is
what worked with China. And that is why the opposite failed so miserably
in the 1990s.
DR. MATTAIR: Martin, about your comment that Iran has no interest
in Arab-Israeli peace. Why do they not have an interest in their
friends' attaining some of their objectives? Or in ending sanctions
and threats, and the real possibility of strikes against Iran?
AMB, INDYK: The answer to your question lies with the Iranians, not
with me. And that is the heart of the problem here. What are Iran's
intentions? Is it just that they are a benign power that seeks peace in
their environment, and the United States and its Arab and Israeli allies
are seeking to destroy and overthrow the regime, and therefore, it has
every reason to behave in this way? I think that is a fundamental
distortion of reality. That is not what this Iranian regime is about. It
is a revolutionary regime. It prides itself on being a revolutionary
regime. It seeks to change the status quo in the region. It seeks to
subvert Arab regimes. It seeks to spread its influence and its
revolution to the far-flung parts of the Middle East. That is its
historical record. It is not doing that out of some kind of
defensiveness because the United States is going after it.
The United States has repeatedly--and Hillary knows this very
well--tried to engage with this revolutionary regime. It has repeatedly
rebuffed these efforts, saying that we didn't do it effectively
enough, or pursue it long enough. But the fact of the matter is, we
tried, and they never showed an interest. There was one time in which
they showed an interest--Hillary has written about this--which was when
we overthrew Saddam Hussein, and suddenly they got scared about what we
might do to them. I am not recommending that as a policy here. But it
does happen to be, historically, the reality. The rest of the time, they
have done their level best to subvert our efforts at making the Middle
East a more peaceful and more stable place. They see the United States
as "the Great Satan." They have defined us as the enemy. We
didn't define them as the enemy. And there are good, strong
historical reasons why they see our defeat in the region in a very
zero-sum way.
So we can imagine that somehow, if we took their interests into
account, we could reach an accommodation with that. But what is Hillary
proposing here? It is an accommodation in which, I think, she said we
accepted and respected their interests in the region. Well, what are
their interests in the region? How do we define them? What is it we are
being asked to accept here? Is it that they are the dominant power in
the region, that they will be the arbiter of the fate of Lebanon and
Palestine? Because that is not something that I think the United States
can accept.
If they want to talk about their legitimate security concerns in
the Gulf, that is a completely different story. If they want to talk
about their need for a civilian nuclear program, that is a completely
different story. Those are legitimate interests. But their desire to
dominate the Middle East is not a legitimate interest of Iran. And to
propose that we sit down and negotiate with them that kind of grand
bargain requires an abrogation of our very real interests in the region.
We are not just talking about Israel here. We are talking about our Arab
allies as well, who also feel deeply threatened by Iran's ambitions
in their neighborhood and by Iran's efforts to subvert them. So I
think we need to be realistic here.
If I could just make two other points about Ian's very
interesting argument about Israeli hysteria. First of all, a point that
Ian and Paul have made is that the Iranians are very clearly threatening
Israel and Israel's people and government, especially given their
history; it would be foolish not to take those threats seriously. But I
don't think hysteria captures what is actually happening in Israel
today. The Israelis are actually responding, I think, quite calmly to
the circumstances in which the Iranians continue to produce low-enriched
uranium--now, according to the IAEA, enough for two nuclear weapons if
they were to enrich it to high-grade-enriched uranium. The Israelis are
focused on sanctions.
The Israeli government, whether you believe them or not, is now
talking about a two-state solution, wanting direct negotiations with the
Palestinians, trying to work with the president to get into those
negotiations. They are not at this point talking about bombing Iran.
That kind of talk has essentially been removed from their lexicon for
the last year or so. This is not to say that they don't reserve the
right to it, or that they don't argue that the threat of force
should be on the table. But I don't see a hysteria in Israel today
about the Iranian nuclear program. They seem to be approaching it in a
very calm and deliberative way.
Q: Even if Israel were willing to pull back to the Green Line and
give back to the Palestinians East Jerusalem and everything, I still
don't see the West Bank and Gaza being viable. What is your vision
of a two-state solution that would actually be viable?
DR. LUSTICK: Economic viability is more or less irrelevant in my
view. It has always been irrelevant. There are very few countries in the
world that are economically viable stand-alone entities. The real
question is, what kind of Palestinian state could take its place at the
table, be a passport-issuing organization for Palestinians, and generate
cover for Arab regimes and for Israelis to put this issue behind them
and move on. That has always been the possibility.
The questioner, of course, points to what everybody now sees. The
settlements, for ideological reasons inside Israel, were designed and
have had the effect--along with a movement that, of course, assassinated
Rabin--to stop that from ever happening. I myself believe that it is
basically in the dustbin of history. I don't really see a way to
rescue it. I offered one image of a way that tied vital American
interests publicly to the requirement for a Palestinian state. That is
the only way I can see it done: the United States does something that is
portrayed and is, in fact, necessary for U.S. vital national-security
interests. Thereby, the president can deal with the political problems
at home that would be associated with the steps necessary--not big
steps, not cutting off aid. All you have to do is start voting in the UN
Security Council the way the United States actually feels. That would
basically do a lot in that direction.
My own view is we have to start developing multiple utopias. You
have to think beyond the idea of a two-state solution toward the fact
that most of these kinds of problems historically don't have
solutions--that when history provides a solution, we don't look
back and say, that's nice, it was a solution. No, it wasn't a
solution in the sense of a negotiated architecture that finessed the
problem and found a win-win outcome. No, somebody won and somebody lost.
And in 30 years, I have grave doubts that there will be in Israel
anything like what we see today. In 100 years, there will be a solution.
That is a horrible thing to contemplate. But when you think about the
other countries that have disappeared from the planet--I don't mean
swallowed up by the earth; I mean that the regime disappeared--the
Soviet Union, South Africa, the shah's Iran, Yugoslavia--these were
countries that, within 10 or even five years before they disappeared,
you wouldn't have known they were about to disappear.
We have to start thinking about how states behave when they start
to see the horizon of their existence. Israel's response to Iran is
hysterical in that sense, and it is understandable: they are approaching
an abyss. When Martin says that, in the last year, the Israelis have
taken off the table any talk of striking Iran militarily, that is pretty
amazing as an indication of their non-hysteria. Only in the last year
previous to that, I heard Prime Minister Netanyahu, in person and in
private, go off like a rocket about the need to attack Iran, to end this
Nazi threat to the world. When 51 percent of Israelis say they want to
attack Iran now, what we see is that the policies of the government to
speak in Nazi terms create a mood of hysteria, whether or not the
Israeli government any longer talks that talk right now or not. This may
not be a crystal-clear answer to your question. I don't want to
bury the two-state solution. I think it is the only negotiated way out
of this. I just don't think that a negotiated way out is what we
are going to see.
MS. MANN LEVERETT" I, too, am concerned that a two-state
solution could be in the dustbin of history. I think that should concern
everybody who is interested in stability, particularly in U.S. interests
in the Middle East. But there are two key components that have not
really been faced that need to be. One, of course, is the space, the
actual land, the actual territory that would be needed to create a
Palestinian state. That gets into the question of viability. I think the
Obama administration half-heartedly tried to do that in pushing for a
settlement freeze, but they didn't go as far as they would have
needed for that to have really been a focal point for a negotiated
settlement. But the critical piece here, that the Obama administration
doesn't go anywhere near, is this: Who needs to be at the table to
negotiate what we know is going to be a less than satisfying, to say the
least, negotiated outcome? To have people who sit in Ramallah--where
Ramallah could be part of the Palestinian state--negotiate away the
patrimony of all Palestinians, doesn't make any sense.
The idea that representatives of Hamas are going to be kept out and
marginalized and weakened so that people in Ramallah can live a nice
life is fanciful. We need to have people at the table who represent
constituencies and legitimate grievances that are inconvenient for us,
because they are the ones who can make the concessions. That is
something that U.S. policy doesn't touch.
Q: What can we do to ward off a potential unilateral Israeli strike
against Iran? I have feared this since I read "Clean Break"
back in 1996, which called for regime change in Iran and then Iraq. I
fear it more now after hearing Netanyahu's interview while he was
here, saying that everything is on the table. It's been reinforced
by some of the things that Mr. Indyk has said.
AMB. INDYK: We can convince Iran to come into compliance with its
obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Then there wouldn't
be the problem. Again, it's a question of what's the cause
here and what's the effect. But I agree with Ian that it's
unlikely we're going to be able to persuade Iran by the combination
of factors we're now trying to use--international pressure,
sanctions and perhaps some progress towards a comprehensive Arab-Israeli
peace. I don't think, in the end, those things are going to be
sufficient to prevent Iran from at least having a robust breakout
capability. And at that point, the United States--not just Israel--is
going to be faced with a very real choice between two problematic
options. The first is not an Israeli use of force, but an American use
of force to deal with Iran's nuclear facilities. I don't think
I have to tell this audience the problems and difficulties involved with
that approach.
The alternative is to live with Iranian nuclear weapons, and
that's also a very difficult proposition, not so much because the
Iranians will use those weapons in an effort to destroy Israel. I agree
with Paul that that's unlikely, because they do care, ultimately,
about the survival of their regime more than anything else, and it would
be the end of their regime if they tried that. But it would be highly
problematic. It would put Israel on a hair trigger; it would put other
Arab states in a situation where they will have to decide whether they
can live under Iranian nuclear hegemony or go down the road that Iran
has gone down of acquiring nuclear capabilities. Once we head in that
direction, the Middle East becomes a far more unstable place, far more
likely to be one in which there's a nuclear arms race underway. And
that's highly problematic, too. So down the road from here
we're faced with two bad choices. That's why it's
critically important to do our best, even if we can't see how
it's going to work, to try to bring Iran back to the negotiating
table by a variety of means that will convince it that it's not in
its interests to go down this road.
DR. PILLAR: It's a good and fair question, and since I raised
the topic, I wish I had a better specific answer. It's mostly a
matter of diplomatic tactics and rhetorical art. I think it's a
matter of a combination, in our dealings with Israel, of firmness on
those matters that do not relate to the core objective of Israel's
basic security--things like settlements--and reassurance on the core
issues of Israel's security. I think what we need to get away from
not just in our declaratory policy, but in the whole discourse about
relations with Israel, is this unidimensional way of viewing it: that
relations are good or bad; up or down. But it's not really
unidimensional. There is nothing inconsistent about firmness on
something like the settlements issue, which has absolutely nothing to do
with the basic security of Israelis, combined with reassuring words, as
well as deeds, about U.S. support for Israel's basic security, as
it might be threatened by Iran or anyone else.
MS. MANN LEVERETT: I think the only way that you can prevent an
Israeli strike on Iran is for there to be a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement
that would deal with Israel's security concerns. Even more
important, it would reorient the relationship between the United States
and Iran and reorient what Iran perceives to be its security concerns
and what it needs to do--whether we agree or not--to protect itself and
its government and its system. Iran thinks that it needs to do this
because it is basically in a state of conflict with the United States.
If it were not, it would see its security paradigm differently. Some
could argue that it's still some sort of Islamo-fascist state and
that, even if it weren't in a conflict with the United States, it
would still see its security paradigm irrationally. I don't buy it,
but at least that would be an argument. What we need to do is reorient
the relationship between the United States and Iran so that they
don't look at their neighbors and the region in zero-sum terms
because of the conflict with the United States.
If you take the example of China, Japan was very concerned that a
rapprochement between the United States and China would negatively
impact Japan. But one of the things that helped Japan, not only in terms
of its economic boom but its fundamental security, was a U.S.-Chinese
rapprochement that did not put Japan in the target zone. If there is a
U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, Israel may not be as concerned that it is in
the target zone of an Iran that is out to hurt the United States, even
indirectly through harassing Israel.
So the way to deal with the security threat is not to try more
sanctions. We sanctioned the Iranians for 30 years, and all that has
done is bring us closer to the brink of conflict. More sanctions have
not worked; they will not work. To reorient the relationship, as we did
with China, Jordan, and Egypt, is what has worked in the past and has
the best prospect of working in the future to prevent the Israelis from
having to take matters into their own hands.
DR. LUSTICK: I mentioned this idea of a folie a deux. It works in a
few ways. I think the Israelis are not going to strike Iran. All we have
to do to prevent any Israeli strike is, not turn off the red light.
Every time Israel has used significant force in the Middle East, such as
against Lebanon, 10 years later, scholars have measured the extent to
which that occurred because the United States turned on the yellow
light, turned on the green light, or turned off the red light. We just
shouldn't turn off the red light against attacking Iran. Israel,
especially when it comes to nuclear weapons, will not take the risk of
making a war like that when it doesn't have a superpower behind it.
On the other hand, each side in this argument values the image that
Israel is about to strike. The Iranian side of the argument, that the
United States should aggressively seek rapprochement with Iran, likes
the idea: "Israel is about to strike; you better hurry up and
negotiate with us." The Israelis, of course, like it: "You
better hurry up and strike Iran yourself and deal with this problem, or
we will strike."
I want to remind you that it was not the British who overthrew
Mosaddegh in Iran; it was the Americans. But the Americans went in to do
it only when the British came to us and convinced us that, because of
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's nationalization, this was a
"nationalist" project in Iran that was actually communist.
Therefore, the United States should go in there and stop it. It's
effectively the same thing happening again, from an Iranian point of
view, except this time, it's the Israelis coming to the United
States saying a project with a lot of nationalist importance in
Iran--nuclear development--is being carried out, not by a communist
regime, but a Nazi regime, and we should take care of it. This dynamic
is very familiar to Iranians, and we should not get caught up in it
again. We're still paying a price for getting caught up in it in
the early 1950s.
Q: In his very good book Innocent Abroad, Martin Indyk comes to the
conclusion, that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not
possible. That being the case, should the United States not delink
relations with Iran, to the extent possible, from the whole question of
the so-called peace process? Ought we not be able to pursue discussions
and relations with Iran on those matters without reference to the peace
process?
MS. MANN LEVERETT: I certainly share your and Martin's
pessimism in terms of prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, though I
do think it is necessary. Again, if we look at the precedent where
rapprochement has worked effectively, where you have a rising power in
its regional context, even a hostile rising power in its regional
context--here, I focus primarily on China--where there was an issue that
the United States and China disagreed about vehemently--Taiwan--it was
bracketed. We still disagree about it to this day, but at least the
rapprochement between the United States and China was able to dial back
both the rhetoric and the military preparedness on both sides regarding
extreme actions about Taiwan.
So just as the United States and China sought and struck a
rapprochement for much bigger issues than Taiwan, I think the United
States and Iran need to have a rapprochement in the same way. Iran,
though it doesn't approach what China meant back in the 1970s, has
some similarity in terms of its rising regional role. This is not just
because of Iran's tremendous hydrocarbon resources or its nearly
80-million-person population or its strategic position at the crossroads
of Asia and the Middle East, but because of U.S. mistakes, particularly
over the past seven years. Iran has capitalized on those mistakes.
Iran's power has ascended as U.S. power is in relative decline. I
don't see that changing, so we need to, in some way, make peace
with Iran's rising regional role and our relative decline on the
global stage. We need to do that in the same way we did with China, and
not in a way that's dependent on the biggest issue of contention:
for China-U.S., it was Taiwan; for U.S.-Iran, it's Israel.
DR. PILLAR: I agree with Hillary's comments and with the
premise of the question. Unfortunately, a lot of the linkage in our
minds these days refers back to what Ian described as the Netanyahu
government's tactic and the parable of the talking bear. Linkage
sometimes does work to our advantage, as Nixon and Kissinger skillfully
showed with their triangular great-power diplomacy back in the 1970s.
But in this case, it works more to our disadvantage.
Q: I'd like to frame the disagreements in terms of conflict
analysis and transformation. The dominant paradigm that Martin Indyk was
referring to is based on coercion, threat, isolation, punishment and
pressure. There's research on about 100 cases of sanctions, and
they failed 86 percent of the time. Ian was talking about the hysteria,
that parties are more dangerous when they're acting out of fear. A
lot of things that policy makers and even well-meaning people believe in
have the opposite effect. People were saying that peace is not possible.
Maybe that's because of the lens that we're using. You
can't observe the behavior of a party like Iran without looking at
the effect of our own policy. I think the comments of Hillary and Ian
are consistent with principles of social science, conflict
transformation and tension reduction. What are the common interests
between Israel and Iran that could be mutually beneficial?
DR. LUSTICK: If you talk about the psychological factor that I
mentioned, that kind of trauma becomes enshrined in the mythology of a
political formula and is institutionalized. What happens in any
ideology, including Zionism, is that the founding problem--the problem
that existed when it arose as a solution--gets solved and the world is
very, very different from the world where the institutionalization of
that solution is operating. It keeps operating in the same way. You have
efforts to redeem land in Galilee when there's no shortage of land
for Jews to live in the Galilee. You have immigration efforts to save
Jews when there's no immigration. So you have a fear that
there's Nazi-like anti-Semitism; therefore, you're seeing it
all the time. This is partly the leftovers of the trauma itself.
There's a tremendous literature on PTSD, in which you can see a lot
more about Israel than you otherwise would see. One of the things that
it does is to force the victims to keep seeing things that aren't
there--seeing things that are other things as if they were the Nazis.
There are a lot of different approaches to PTSD. I'm not so sure
you can just take a clinical practice and apply it nationally. But I
think, in the long run, Israel and Jews in general have to remove
remembrance of the Holocaust as such a central part of their lives if
Israel is going to avoid the utter tragedy of producing that which it
most fears.
MS. MANN LEVERETT: I think I understood the core of your question
as, are there mutual interests that Israel and Iran could play off with
one another? It's very interesting in Trita Parsi's book, The
Treacherous Alliance, where he documents a lot about the relationship
between the United States, Israel and Iran. He makes the argument that
it wasn't until after the Iran-Iraq War and the fall of the Soviet
Union that the Israeli-Iranian relationship became so acrimonious. We
all remember the 1980s and the Iran-Contra scandal. The Israelis were
supplying the Iranians with all sorts of weapons systems and other
things. Even at the height of what could have been cast as the
revolutionary period for Iran after the fall of the shah and the
establishment of the Islamic Republic, that first decade was not marked
by Israeli-Iranian acrimony.
Parsi argues that the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the fall of the
Soviet Union--the end of the Cold War--essentially deprived Israel and
Iran of a common enemy that they could arm against, that they could
rally against, that they could have mutual interests, here and there,
against. Nothing has really replaced that in terms of some common cause.
Instead, what's happened--unfortunately, with the support of the
United States--is that these two critically important players in the
Middle East have become regional rivals, regional competitors. They see
everything in zero-sum terms.
Whether it's possible at this point for there to be a common
agenda is speculative, at best. But I will put out one thing from my
experience in dealing with the Iranians officially over Afghanistan: We
dealt with them as a partner. For example, for the donor summits on
Afghanistan, particularly the first one in Tokyo in January 2002, the
Iranians were not just invited; they were put on a steering committee.
They put up $500 million, and they are one of the few countries in the
world to actually make good on almost every penny of their stated
donation to Afghanistan.
What did we do after the 2008 Israeli military Operation Cast Lead
in Gaza? We had a similar sort of donor conference in Sharm el-Sheikh,
but we did what we always do on Iran when it comes to Palestinian
issues. We didn't put them on the steering committee. We kept them
out, and we made it as if it was a rallying cry for the entire Middle
East to stand against Iran and Hamas. That is a really poor paradigm for
any kind of functional diplomacy.
I'm not saying that it would work the same way that it did in
Afghanistan, but we do have a precedent in Afghanistan, where Iran
worked cooperatively with the United States, even when our interests
were not always aligned. They've also worked with us, in some
instances, on Iraq, where our interests are not always aligned. I'm
not saying there are high hopes for any kind of common agenda between
Israel and Iran, but we know for a fact that setting them up and goading
them to be each other's regional rivals doesn't work. So I do
think that the questioner is right. We should be looking for an
opportunity for the Iranians to be brought into a donor conference, in a
way that's not necessarily confrontational or controversial. It
should not be that hard.
Q: Why do we keep thinking that sanctions on Iran will help, when
they usually fail?
DR. LUSTICK: The simple, but uncomfortable, answer to the question
is that it implies that foreign-policy moves by the United States--for
example, towards sanctions--come out of some kind of realist
calculation. In fact, the reason we do sanctions is because it's
necessary to do something in terms of domestic political pressures. By
doing something, you can postpone the question of whether it's
going to work. The Iranian nuclear capacity slides into view, and
it's not like you did nothing. If you had done something, maybe it
wouldn't have happened, but you don't want to attack. So, in
that sense, sanctions play a positive role. It has nothing to do with an
expectation that it's going to stop this process.
DR. PILLAR: That's the main explanation, but in fairness to a
sanctions regime, you can say a couple of other things. One,
there's not quite as much fecklessness as there was when it was
solely a unilateral matter. And now, you know, our differences with the
Europeans, and even occasionally with the Russians, are far fewer than
they were before. The main deficiency with regard to the effectiveness
of sanctions on Iran is not so much the sanctions themselves, but the
carrots to go with the sticks. If there is no reason for the other side
to believe that there is a basis for an improved relationship,
there's no incentive to respond in the way that we would hope they
would respond to sanctions. So don't just indict the sticks; look
for the missing carrots.
MS. MANN LEVERETT: I think it's very important to remember
that, after the revolution in Iran, there were some sanctions in place,
but then they were largely taken back because of the deal to get the
release of U.S. hostages. The comprehensive unilateral U.S. embargo on
Iran really was imposed in 1995, in response to then President
Rafsanjani's galling idea that he was going to open up investment
in Iranian hydrocarbons to the West. Not just to the West; he offered
the first deal to Conoco, an American company, with the idea that there
could be the start of a process to normalize relations between the
United States and Iran, if you could get the United States involved, in
its own interest, in developing Iran's hydrocarbons.
The concern here, particularly in the Clinton administration, where
I worked at the time, was, if we allowed that to happen, we would be
entering into a process that would legitimate the Islamic Republic, as
such. That was impossible because of domestic politics here in the
United States. So the response was not to just say, no thank you, but to
say to U.S. companies, you are now barred legally from participating in
that process. The next year, American companies complained about that
legitimately--their business was going to the Europeans. That's
what then led to the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act the following year, 1996,
to try to impose sanctions on other companies investing in Iran's
hydrocarbon resources.
So the sanctions regime is not really a short-term strategy, as was
posited by one of our speakers. It's not really meant to bring Iran
to the negotiating table. It is posited to put a question mark over the
very legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. If that was ever a good idea, I
think today, 30 years later, with the gains the Islamic Republic has
made internally and in its regional standing, it certainly is not a good
idea.
Q: The United States has an integral role in Middle Eastern
politics, especially after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How much do
these wars affect Iranian foreign and nuclear policies and the agenda
towards Israel, which is considered a U.S. proxy?
DR. PILLAR: Both Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate considerable
convergence, or at least parallel interests, between the United States
and Iran. Hillary referred earlier to those very few weeks or months in
late 2001 and the beginning of 2002, in which the United States and
Tehran were working cooperatively on the political rebuilding of
Afghanistan, until we declared them part of the Axis of Evil. And, of
course, our taking out of Saddam Hussein removed Iran's biggest
enemy, the one that had launched a war of aggression, at enormous cost
in Iranian lives, in the 1980s.
MS. MANN LEVERETT: The cooperation that we had with Iran over
Afghanistan, in particular, could have set the stage for a more
cooperative relationship that would have redounded to everybody's
benefit in the region, if we had taken it forward to normalize
relations. Today, unfortunately, there is the idea that we could turn
the clock back to 2003 or 2001, and just do the same thing with Iran,
but this time, instead of being in a presidency characterized by the
Axis of Evil, we're in the Obama era, and things will be different.
Unfortunately, because of U.S. mistakes, Iran has the upper hand in
Iraq. It is not wondering about its interests. It's not hoping that
Saddam Hussein isn't going to attack it with chemical weapons. In
Afghanistan, it's even more complicated for us.
Today, I think, there is growing recognition in the United States
that there is no military resolution and that there needs to be a
political settlement that includes the Taliban. That is something that
the Iranians see as a red line. The Iranians are not going to sit at the
table with us and calmly nod as we try to bring about a political
settlement that includes the Taliban and lets our forces leave. For the
Iranians, there is no exit from Afghanistan. They're there to stay.
They're not going to make it easier for us to leave because of some
fig leaf of Taliban representation. They want no Taliban representation
whatsoever.
That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. We need to figure
out how to be working with the Iranians constructively. The
alternative--and this will be very bad for Israel and our Arab
allies--is that, not only do we have chaos in Afghanistan, but on top of
that, we're going to have a proxy war in which Iran sees it as in
its vital interest to support its allies in Afghanistan against the
allies of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. If we don't try to figure out
how to work with Iran now in Afghanistan, we are looking at a proxy war
in that country, on top of the chaos that's already there. The
Iranians will then take it out on American allies--Israelis, Saudis or
others.