The end of dual containment: Iraq, Iran and Smart Sanctions: the following is an edited transcript of a conference sponsored by the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Middle East Policy Council and the Stanley Foundation.

Katzman, Kenneth ; Murphy, Richard ; Cameron, Fraser 等

The end of dual containment: Iraq, Iran and Smart Sanctions: the following is an edited transcript of a conference sponsored by the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, the Atlantic Council of the United States, the Middle East Policy Council and the Stanley Foundation. The meeting was held on June 20, 2001, in the Library of Congress with Chas. W. Freeman, Jr. and Mary Jane Deeb moderating. (Symposium: Iraq, Iran and Smart Sanctions)

CHAS. W. FREEMAN, JR., president, Middle East Policy Council

Winston Churchill once famously remarked that you could always count on the United States to do the right thing after it had exhausted all of the alternatives. We may now have exhausted the alternatives in the Gulf, and this is an important moment. We have had our elections and after some confusion we have a new president. We have a new administration, and we have some new thinking about foreign policy.

Iran has just had its elections and has reelected the reformist group with an expanded mandate. The Iran-Libya Sanctions Act is coming to the end of its term and is being reexamined. U.S.-sponsored sanctions against Iraq have not been successfully reformulated yet in the United Nations and may not be. And there is, therefore, a great deal of question about the future of the Iraq policy we have been following, something which The Washington Post this morning discusses.

Finally, having just returned from a trip to the region, there has never been a greater degree of alienation from the United States than at present. Countries in the region are not in tune with our Iran policy, our Iraq policy, or our Israel or Palestinian policies.

KENNETH KATZMAN, senior analyst, Middle East and African Affairs, Library of Congress

First a few disclaimers: I'm speaking for myself today, but of course within the CRS framework of balance and objectivity. The title of my talk is "The Erosion of Dual Containment." I'm not willing to declare it dead quite yet, but it is clearly going in that direction. Dual containment was a U.S. construct articulated for an environment -- the Persian Gulf -- whose natural tendency is towards balance of power and accommodation. The United States has the political, economic and military strength to contain and confront countries such as Iran and Iraq with diplomatic and economic sanctions. The Persian Gulf monarchy states of the Gulf Cooperation Council do not have that type of strength. And they do not look for ways to confront and contain. They traditionally looked for ways to accommodate their neighbors.

In my view, the philosophy of dual containment was unsustainable from its inception. If it were attempted seriously and did not succeed, the Gulf states would be so fearful of retribution from Iran and Iraq that they would quickly seek accommodation with them. On the other hand, if it did succeed, then the Gulf states' threat perception of Iran and Iraq would drop so sharply that they would also want to accommodate them. So either success or failure of dual containment leads to accommodation between the Gulf states and Iran and Iraq. The whole philosophy was flawed from the beginning, with all due respect to the policy makers who designed it.

A very good example of the hesitancy of the Gulf states to confront potential adversaries is their virtually nonexistent defense cooperation strategy. Even after being on the front lines of the Iran-Iraq War for eight years and having one of their own -- Kuwait -- swallowed up, they still have yet to articulate or implement a common defense strategy. Their joint Peninsula Shield force is about 8,000. They've talked for at least seven years about beefing it up to 25,000, but there has been very little action on this. The defense strategy of the Gulf states is basically to place a 911 call to the United States.

The Gulf monarchies have also always been fearful that U.S. containment policies would rebound against them. And they're never quite certain that the United States will come to their rescue. For example, even after Saddam had swallowed Kuwait, there was a genuine debate inside the U.S. government as to how we should respond. Could we live with this invasion? With the occupation of Kuwait? Ultimately it was decided we couldn't, and we confronted and defeated it. But the Gulf states know that there was a debate.

The Gulf states also have some justification to be nervous about U.S. staying power in the region. They certainly remember that after the marine-barracks bombing in 1983 the United States pulled out of Lebanon. Now, of course, successive administrations have made it quite clear that our strategic interests in the Gulf are so overriding that we would not be scared out of the Gulf by a terrorist bombing. However, is that perfectly clear to the Gulf states? I would argue that it is not all that clear.

And it's human nature, when you're not absolutely certain what somebody's going to do, to hedge your bets. You play ball with the United States; you ally yourself with them. But also you keep feelers out to Iran and Iraq, This is what they've done.

Sanctions

A key part of the U.S. dual-containment strategy was to impose and maintain strict U.S. economic and diplomatic sanctions on Iran and Iraq. Economic sanctions are an accepted currency of U.S. foreign policy. They were deemed to have worked in the case of South Africa, for example. Even secondary sanctions are not beyond the pale for the United States: witness the early-1980s attempt to sanction Europe if they cooperated with the gas pipeline that the Soviets wanted to build.

The problem with this strategy is that the regional governments and European allies have to cooperate with the U.S. sanctions strategy. European disagreement with the United States on philosophical, political and economic grounds is well-known. The Europeans were willing to go along with international sanctions against Iraq because those sanctions had a U.N. mandate. But Iran was a totally different story because no similar international imprimatur existed.

The European governments took particular umbrage at the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA). The continuation of the markup is occurring today in the House International Relations Committee after some disagreement last Wednesday over it. For the Europeans, ILSA brought back memories of the U.S. attempt to block the Soviet gas pipeline, and they took particular exception to secondary sanctions especially. They think the United States was being somewhat hypocritical by trying to dismantle the Arab boycott of Israel while simultaneously trying to organize a boycott against Iran.

Maintaining Gulf support for sanctions against Iran and Iraq was even more difficult than maintaining European support. I would argue that economic sanctions are virtually an alien concept in the Arab-Muslim world. They ate rarely imposed and even more rarely enforced. For them to do so would be to travel down a very dangerous road in a region in which trade routes have existed for centuries and in which many of the elites make their money from trading. One notable exception was the Syrian decision to close down the Iraq-Syria oil pipeline in 1982 and side with Iran's war effort against Iraq.

I would argue that Iraq was becoming so desperate that Syria thought closing that pipeline could make a real difference on the battlefield. My view is the Arab/Muslim governments will only go with sanctions when they can make a real difference. Symbolic sanctions are very rare and not widely accepted. I would argue that the Arab boycott of Israel is a different situation and doesn't negate the basic thesis here.

In the context of dual containment, it's instructive to look at the case of the United Arab Emirates and Iran. Containment of Iran included a U.S. ban on re-exportation of American products, including computer technology. Yet despite the conflict between Iran and the UAE over Abu Musa and the two Tunb islands, the emirate of Dubai not only continued vigorous trade with Iran, but even continued to serve as a base for the re-exportation of U.S. goods.

Smart Sanctions

If it is difficult to sustain a containment policy on Iran and Iraq when the regional tendency is toward accommodation, what is the future of smart-sanctions proposals? If some of the propositions I've advanced here today are true, it is very difficult to see how Secretary Powell's plan for smart sanctions on Iraq is going to work. The plan relies on an implicit tradeoff in which the United States will allow civilian goods to flow more freely to Iraq, and in exchange we get tighter controls on dual-use exports, putting revenues from extra oil into an escrow account, or in some way bringing that oil flow under the oil-for-food program rather than having it go into Saddam's pocket.

The regional view of this smart-sanctions plan is extremely negative, as it flies in the face of the trend toward greater accommodation with Iraq. This regional hesitancy is apparently causing a hold-up in agreement on the new plan, which needs to go into effect by July 3. The Israeli-Palestinian issue has greatly complicated the U.S. effort to get agreement on smart sanctions from the governments around Iraq.

On Iran, as noted above, countries in the region and in Europe never went along with U.S. sanctions against Iran anyway. So it is difficult to see how a smart-sanctions plan for Iran could be implemented. U.S. sanctions right now are affecting primarily U.S. companies, not Iran and not U.S. competitors. ILSA renewal is under debate, and in accordance with an emphasis on smart sanctions the administration is attempting to persuade Congress to renew ILSA for only two years instead of the planned five.

There is apparently no discussion yet within the administration about rolling back the unilateral U.S. trade and investment ban on Iran. In my view, if Iran were to accept the U.S. offer of a political dialogue, many if not all of the U.S. sanctions would be rolled back immediately. Therefore what is needed are creative ways to persuade Iran to enter into dialogue rather than creative thinking about smart sanctions.

RICHARD MURPHY, senior fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

I don't live in this city, which puts me at both a considerable advantage and some disadvantage. You're not as deeply concerned as we are in Manhattan about Mayor Giuliani's divorce. But, you are concerned about statecraft, and politics dominate your every waking hour. And the language you're accustomed to hearing about statecraft can be so wonderfully imprecise.

I have in mind phrases used about our Gulf policies such as: "We've drawn a line in the sand" and "he's in the box." I was raised near the seashore, where a line in the sand was something I knew was erased by the next wave. As to he or she being in the box, I note that we often fail to ask where we are when he or she is in that box. I submit that we are in a box of our own construction, and one that is equally hard to get out of. The prize abuse of language however, is the phrase we so fervently repeat about our energy policy: that "we support the free flow of oil from the Gulf." We haven't done that for some years. And it certainly applies only to oil that isn't coming out of either Iraq or Iran.

I thought I would make my comments particularly on Iran and relate them to the recently published Atlantic Council report, which the sponsors of today's meeting have placed on the table for you. How did we get where we are in terms of U.S.-Iranian relations? You have to go at least back to 1953 with the Mossadeq affair, because even for those Iranians born after the shah was deposed, the U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the Mossadeq government is still a bad memory. We had a generation of close ties with the shah after he returned to Tehran in 1953. We've had about as long an estrangement from Iran since his ouster. How did Iran move so abruptly from being one of our closest allies in the Gulf to our harshest critic? And how long will we stand on our current policy without rethinking it?

The bitter memory of the seizure of our embassy and the insult of their holding the staff hostage for those 440 days has colored our view of the revolution for years. As Americans we have always been uneasy about the linkage between religion and state, and we heard that language in spades during those early years of the Iranian revolution. There was much talk of Iran's leadership of a worldwide movement aimed at overturning those corrupt regimes that it termed non-Islamic. They placed in that category just about every government friendly to the United States. There was also evidence of the funding and training of terrorist operatives to target regimes in North Africa, in the Peninsula, in the Levant.

Our concern for the impact of that revolution and the effect that it might have on our friends in the area did lead us to tilt American policy towards Iraq during the eight bloody years of that war with Iran, which finally ground to a halt in 1988. History is now being written about our satisfaction over that war and how we were happy to see each bleed the other white. I resist that view. It is revisionist. Certainly my own experience in the Department of State at that time was that we wanted to bring that war to an end. Its continuation spelled a real danger to our interests because of the possibility of its spilling over and destabilizing regimes in the Arabian Peninsula.

Today, as happens throughout history, the temperature of the revolution has dropped. Has the animus among our people towards Iran remained? The evidence suggests at least, not nearly as much outside the Capital Beltway. The investigative files remain open on the Riyadh and Khobar bombings, which took the lives of Americans and many other nationalities. Was there an Iranian hand in these attacks? Was it an official hand? Should the Iranian government itself be blamed? Can we blame just part of a government? All of these questions are still out there awaiting satisfactory answers.

During much of President Clinton's second term, he led a sustained effort to improve the tone of official U.S. comments about the Iranian government. This followed Khatami's surprisingly large margin of victory in 1997, which Washington initially hoped would lead relatively quickly towards a more normal relationship. It has not happened.

Ken Katzman has described the range of economic sanctions. They are of almost incredible complexity. Most of those were placed on Iran well before Khatami was elected.

Before the revolution we'd been Iran's number-one trading partner. Our trade has been at zero for the past several years, although our restrictions on it swung wildly back and forth under both Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations. The embarrassing fact is that well into the 1990s, when we were pressuring other countries to close down their trade links with Iran, we were the major importer of Iranian oil. This was rectified with a vengeance: a cut-off of all U.S.-Iran trade.

President Clinton imposed a program called dual containment on the two countries, blurring from the beginning distinctions that had always existed between Iran and Iraq. Last year we lifted the ban on Iranian caviar -- which I assume you've been enjoying in great quantities -- carpets and pistachio nuts, as a signal of our desire to take tangible steps to improve relations. Not surprisingly, this gesture wasn't wildly applauded in Tehran.

However, Secretary Albright's No Ruz speech of March last year was, to American ears, highly forthcoming. It may have been one of the most heavily redrafted official statements of recent years. But again, it simply didn't resonate loudly and clearly in Tehran, where, reportedly, she was heard praising the elected president and thereby somehow denigrating the supreme leader.

We've repeated our three demands on Iran to cease its support for international terror, for violence against the Arab-Israeli peace process, and its efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Our demands have gone unanswered. To put it more bluntly, our sanctions policy has not changed Iranian behavior. Even when we clarified these real issues, which we would bring to the table -- and we expected Iran to bring perhaps equally difficult issues of its own to us at the table -- this has not stimulated interest in starting official talks.

The Atlantic Council report presents as a central argument that our overall interests are not well served by the continuation of 20 years of adversarial relations. It lays out a program of action, not extremely dramatic, emphasizing -- when the time is right -- how to overcome obstacles to a normal relationship. Any such movement at this time obviously would not be well received in many quarters of this capital. Harsh Iranian attacks on Israel's right to exist as a state, its documented support for Hizballah and radical Palestinian groups are probably the principal obstacles in any administration's mind as it considers its strategy on sanctions.

The administration has shown little appetite for a major move to consign the ILSA to the sundown that was written into the original act, when the vote is brought in the coming weeks. It is strange for any administration to wish to tie its hands for a further period of five years when it could at least fight for a one- or two-year extension as part of the overall review. But, five years today seems like three, given the energetic campaign for its renewal for a full term by AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee). A major point of the report is that it's unnecessary for us to insist on the quid pro quo approach in trying to develop a better relationship with Tehran, although there has to be reciprocity in the longer run.

The box that confines our relationship with Tehran has been built. Maybe there was no more generous way for us to have behaved during that first generation of the revolution. Maybe they couldn't have responded. Even today, many Iranians, not just those we label conservatives, may not be ready for relations or for an official dialogue. But we should be always ready to test that assumption. It is in our broader national interest to do so.

Iran's own mismanagement may well have done as much or more damage to its economy than our actions, but we've succeeded in hurting the Iranian economy. Also, Iranian strategic alliances deserve our closer attention. There's no reason for us to push Iran into the hands of either Beijing or Moscow, suppliers of arms and technology -- not that we're going to easily be able to wipe away any such relationships down the road. And I think that the report's call for our making a cautious opening now to Iran is hard to fault.

FRASER CAMERON, head, Political and Academic Affairs, Delegation of the European Commission

Let me state right at the very beginning that the EU is not opposed to sanctions per se. We have used them in the past, most recently against the Milosevic regime in Yugoslavia on a multilateral basis, and it did achieve results. What we are opposed to, however, is the unilateral imposition of extraterritorial sanctions, which have no basis in international law. And we would argue that the understanding that we reached with the United States back in 1998 has really not been observed by the U.S. side.

Basically we achieved a truce on how to move things forward. But with the continuation of the ILSA legislation, this is not being adhered to. We would argue that it is counterproductive as well as against the tenets of international law. It simply has not been effective in achieving results. Surely that is the principal criterion against which one should measure sanctions. Are they going to work? Are they going to bring about change? We've had the experience of 40 years in the case of Cuba where they simply have not worked.

Our policy is not based on any moral superiority vis-a-vis the United States. It's based on political expediency. We have looked over the years at how regimes have changed, regimes we have been opposed to -- communist regimes and others. By and large it has been through a policy of engagement.

A couple of panelists have made reference to the sanctions that the United States tried to impose on the European Community, as it then was, because of the pipeline with Russia. We opposed that. And we continue to oppose these kinds of sanctions because we believe that opening up through trade, through contacts, through people-to-people exchanges, influx of media, etc., is a better way to actually bring about change than unilateral sanctions.

We're not alone on this. We've not only had some critiques today, but recently there was a good article by Brent Scowcroft in The Washington Post. There's another one in The Washington Post today by Professor Shibley Telhami of Maryland setting out the case against ILSA in very strong terms. A couple of years ago there was another think-tank report from CSIS against unilateral sanctions. And, of course, we have the excellent report before you today of the Atlantic Council, which I think is one of the best reports that I can remember reading on the subject.

What is EU policy towards Iran and Iraq? First, we have no contractual relations with Iran. But we do have a dialogue with Iran since the election of President Khatami in 1997. We meet to discuss political issues in a so-called troika format every six months. We are quite tough on the Iranians, bringing up all the pet issues relating to human rights, women's rights, minority rights, regional issues including the Middle East peace process, proliferation issues and so on. Often just before these meetings -- although the United States doesn't approve of them -- we suddenly get called into the State Department, where they say, we understand you might be meeting the Iranians next week; we wonder if you might just relay the following messages to them.

This year, on the basis of further developments internally in Iran, the Council of Ministers asked the commission to produce a communication on how to move things forward. And we produced a communication in February of this year with a kind of roadmap on how to move forward. This is basically building on the present dialogue. We are making it conditional, as we do with agreements for all third countries: political conditionality, economic conditionality and conditionality with regard to regional progress. Last week, my boss, Chris Patten, met Deputy Foreign Minister Henney in Brussels to actually spell out what this was going to mean. It starts off with low-level intensification of dialogue on practical issues like the environment, drugs, refugees, which are of concern to both Iran and the EU, intensifying the dialogue on political issues like human rights and the rule of law. There have already been some Iranian scholars coming to EU universities under this program. The security dialogue will be continued, and further people-to-people exchanges will take place. When the conditions are right -- and so far we haven't judged them to be right -- we will be ready to enter negotiations for a trade-and-cooperation agreement with Iran.

There are no EU arms sales to Iran. We exclude known security officers from Iran. And we cooperate with the United States and with G8 partners in trying to keep an eye on any terrorist activities. It's not an easy thing to do, but the EU is fully engaged with its partners.

We think Iran is simply too important a country in the region to be ignored, to be isolated. We think the prospects of bringing about policy change are better promoted by an increased dialogue than isolation.

We have no contractual relations with Iraq either. We have supported consistently the U.N. sanctions regime following the end of the Gulf War. We have also provided very substantial amounts of humanitarian assistance, about 250 million euros since 1991 for humanitarian issues, water-purification programs, dealing with children and so on. We think that there is now the prospect with the change of administration for smart sanctions despite the problems -- and there certainly are problems in following through on this -- to actually mitigate the present sanctions policy, which we feel has run its course.

We would welcome discussion, and we are already in discussion both with the United States and with partners in the United Nations about how this might be done. We actually meet within the framework of the Transatlantic Agenda regularly with the United States at all levels. The most recent example was President Bush's meeting with the European Council last week. Sanctions did come up, both at the plenary session and also in the foreign-ministers' meeting. And we agreed that we would really have to work closely together.

That's basically where the EU is coming from. I won't say we are winning the argument here; we're obviously not winning it with ILSA. But we think there are more and more people in the United States who have come to appreciate the EU point of view that dialogue is actually a better way of bringing about change than isolation and unilateral sanctions.

Q&A

Q: Mr. Murphy, what do you think are the prospects that Iran is going to be interested in political dialogue with the United States? Do you see any realistic prospects that that's going to change?

Is there anything the United States could do to bring that about?

AMB. MURPHY: I just hope there's going to be a debate on ILSA in this Congress. And if there isn't a serious debate, I think it's because the road has been so thoroughly and creatively prepared by AIPAC. It has done an extraordinary job of corralling the votes so that there will be virtually no discussion of what it means for U.S. interests.

On your question of how hopeful am I that the Iranians ate going to respond, in terms of political dialogue, I don't know. I was hopeful four years ago, and I'm patient. An Iranian contact said, "your horizons are every four years. That's about as far as you can see. Ours tend to be ten years, maybe 25 years." I can't estimate when the Iranians will respond. But I like the way the final version of the report put it, that we have interests beyond the three issues that we have hammered them on for all these years. And no one would deny the interest that we have in keeping a respectable distance if possible between Iran, Russia and China.

Q: One of the things about U.S.-Iran policy that is missed is the degree of coincidence of strategic interests. How do we compartmentalize our relations with Iran -- cooperate with them on drugs, marginalization of Iraq and Afghanistan -- while continuing to disagree with them on a range of other issues?

AMB. MURPHY: We do have contacts on Afghanistan. There has been a coincidence of interests. And certainly Iraq remains the major threat to Iranian security as seen by the leadership in Iran. But I don't think we can convert Iran into an open strategic ally. But we do share some interests, as you've mentioned. How to move? I think relief on the sanctions could help us get to a dialogue. And it could help other American interests were we to renew ILSA for a limited period and not for the full five-year term. I think it's a program that is within our power to lift and it's in our interest to lift.

DR. KATZMAN: We've already modified some sanctions on Iran. My view is we don't need to chase Iran. We don't need to necessarily lift any sanctions on Iran in advance of a dialogue. But it should be made clear to the Iranians that when they come to the table with us, there is a substantial chance that they will get sanctions relief. North Korea came to the table and got a lot of sanctions lifted. Vietnam came to the table and got all the sanctions lifted. I think it's pretty clear that if Iran comes to the table, it gets sanctions lifted as well. That should not necessarily be offered Iran in advance of coming to the table, however.

Iran is actually our de facto ally in Central Asia. The key cause of instability in Central Asia right now are Sunni Muslim forces allied with the Taliban and Mr. Bin Laden. And Iran is against those forces. According to the equation, therefore, Iran and the United States are on the exact same side in Central Asia. That is a constructive de facto alliance to build on with Iran.

Q: Mr. Cameron, can you describe in greater detail what you mean by a policy that's run its course? Does that mean that goals are either met or no longer important in the way we thought about them once? What aspects would you like to see mitigated and what would you suggest would be the means to do so?

DR. CAMERON: I think what Colin Powell and Chris Patten discussed recently in Brussels after Mr. Powell's tour was that sanctions in Iraq are seen by not only the local population but the regional population as basically a negative policy that harms Iraqi women and children. Therefore, we've lost the PR argument here. How do we get out of that? The discussion is about lifting the sanctions except for tightening control of dual-use and military equipment. If we can do that, I think we will have taken a step back to winning the PR war and mitigating the consequences for the domestic population in Iraq. One can make the argument, of course, that there should be enough money already in the account from oil sales for Saddam Hussein, but that's not how it's perceived by the outside world. It really is important for the wider foreign-policy considerations of the Middle East to try and win back moderate Arab public support for a reasonable policy vis-a-vis Iraq. A change in policy would achieve better the objectives we all want: not only a change in regime, but stricter control of Saddam's ability to actually build weapons of mass destruction.

DR. KATZMAN: There has been very little debate on the issue of U.N. weapons inspections of Iraq over the past few months. Resolution 1284 provides for sanctions suspension if and when weapons inspections in Iraq are fully cooperated with. Everyone seems to have discarded the issue of inspections as not going to succeed. The inspectors will be shown something, they'll declare that Iraq is free of WMD, and then they'll certify a sanctions suspension. To my mind this is a mistake. Smart sanctions are not going to contain Iraq more tightly. More attention should be paid to restoring the weapons-inspection program in Iraq, which did succeed to a dramatic extent in dismantling Iraq's WMD stockpiles and its programs. This is something that should not be automatically dismissed simply because new inspections would not be completely comprehensive. There is tremendous benefit to having professional inspectors running around Iraq even if there are some limitations on their movements.

AMB. MURPHY: For me the attraction of the smart sanctions is twofold. It does help on the humanitarian front, although we're hearing less of the slanders about the United States from the Arab Gulf that our policy is designed to hurt the children and the elderly in Iraq. But this will accelerate its disappearance, I hope, as an argument used against the United States. Second, I can't think of better way to try to get a measure of international support reestablished for our position on Iraq. We may fail. I don't know what the status of the consultations is. July 3 is the next date for a vote at the Security Council. I don't know whether we'll be successful in bringing the Russians and others along with us on that. But, it's worth the try. And I think it makes us look good.

Q: We have not yet asked why Iraq and Iran want weapons of mass destruction. They don't need them for Kuwait. They want weapons of mass destruction because Israel has them. Is it really meaningful to discuss Iran's and Iraq's nuclear weapons without bringing in the question of Israel?

AMB. FREEMAN: Of course it is true that the possession by Israel of weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, chemical and biological -- is a stimulus to proliferation in the region generally. That cannot be denied. And it may well be that the Israelis made a historic mistake in developing that particular arsenal, given its implications. But I would also note that these weapons (chemical in particular) have been most prominently used in Iraq against a dissident Kurdish population and in the Iran-Iraq War, an eight-year war that cost millions of lives. Therefore, I don't think the thesis that the program in Iraq, Iran or elsewhere in the region is directed solely at Israel will withstand scrutiny. As ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, I was on the receiving end of two more Scud missiles than landed in Israel. But I will not at all deny the fundamental point that you're making, that the possession of these sorts of weapons by one state in the region -- Israel -- does stimulate others to want them as well. That is a problem that so far the United States has not been willing to tackle.

DR. KATZMAN: I completely agree. There are many threats other than Israel that would motivate that. To link these WMD programs solely to Israel does not withstand scrutiny.

MR. MURPHY: These countries, too, feel they can balance a superpower. We'll think twice about a nuclear Iran and nuclear weapons in Baghdad. Silkworms aren't enough anymore.

Q: I want to emphasize the importance of the stimulus -- the huge arsenal of atomic weapons that Israel has. You have a minister in the Israeli cabinet now threatening to use atomic weapons against the Aswan Dam. How can the people in the area respond to this?

AMB. FREEMAN: There is a serious problem for U.S. policy in the region when we speak of weapons of mass destruction and refer only to Iraq and Iran. This rings very hollow because there are concerns in Arab countries about what the Israeli arsenal is for. But there is now an additional complication: India and Pakistan, on the other side of Iran and Iraq. And they, too, have their stimulating effect on countries like Iran. So one has to be rather pessimistic about the prospects of avoiding WMD proliferation. Nonetheless, it is worth making the effort, and I thank you for raising the point.

DR. KATZMAN: After the war of '91, which Saddam lost quite clearly, he essentially made a bargain. He's going to keep his regime and in exchange he is going to dismantle all of his weapons of mass destruction. We can talk all day about whether we should have accepted it. There are U.N. resolutions that encapsulate that bargain, and he's required to abide by them.

AMB. MURPHY: I don't think for a minute that this Israeli cabinet minister you're quoting represents the policy of the Israeli government, but, clearly the Israeli prime minister is not in a position to say to him: You're a nutcase, shut up! That's Israeli politics.

MR. CAMERON: It's obvious there's a certain status attached to being a nuclear power. And it's incumbent upon the present nuclear states to do everything possible to both reduce their arsenals to the lowest possible point and to engage seriously with other important states in terms of arms control. I think we're missing a lot of opportunities here. Second, I think we don't put ourselves in the position of what it's like being in Iran or Iraq. If you were in the leadership in Iran, what sort of security policy would you want to pursue? If you can put yourself into the mindset of the elite, then we might actually be able to have a more reflective policy. Finally, thinking out of the box, what happens after Iran does go nuclear? Is it not better to get rid of the sanctions now, because after it goes nuclear it will be much more difficult?

ROBERT LITWAK, director, Division of International Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center; former National Security Council staff member

The Bush administration has expressed its desire to shift U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran from dual containment to what Ambassador Murphy, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft have called differentiated containment. Many obstacles stand in the way of such a change. Prominent among them on the American side is the Bush administration's decision to revive the rogue-state policy jettisoned a year ago by the Clinton administration. That revival, which was made in connection with ballistic-missile defense, will significantly limit the Bush administration's political space -- with the Congress and with the American public at large -- to implement such a differentiated approach.

From the beginning, the dual-containment and rogue-state policies were linked. NSC official Martin Indyk gave a speech in 1993 enunciating the dual-containment policy. That was followed in spring 1994 by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake's Foreign Affairs article in which dual containment was broadened to encompass a wider group of states, beyond just Iraq and Iran, that were labeled "backlash" and later "rogue" states.

The Gulf War established Iraq as the prototype rogue state -- a third-world country, armed with weapons of mass destruction, that employed terrorism as an instrument of state policy, and that threatened a region of vital interest to the United States. This rogue-state threat supplanted the Soviet threat in the post-Cold War period and became the primary focus of U.S. national security policy. Secretary of State Albright further elevated the rogue-state concept to official status. She argued that rogue states constituted one of four distinct categories of countries in the post-Cold War world -- the other three being advanced industrial democracies, emerging democratic states with market economies, and "failed" states.

But the rogue-state policy suffered from three major liabilities. First, the term "rogue state" had no standing in international law and was applied selectively by the Clinton administration. Thus, Cuba was occasionally included in the rogue-state roster even though it met none of the "rogue state" criteria because that played well in the Cuban emigre community in Florida; by contrast, Syria, which possesses chemical weapons and is on the State Department's terrorism list, was omitted from rogue status because of its importance to the Middle East peace process.

Second, the implementation of the rogue-state policy led to a major dispute with the United States' key allies. The European Union and Canada rejected the extra-territorial (so-called "secondary") sanctions provisions of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act and the Helms-Burton Act. As one Clinton administration official acknowledged, it changed the political dynamic from "the United States and the world versus Iran" to "Iran and the world versus the United States."

Third, and most significantly, the policy led to strategic inflexibility. The term was an instrument used by the administration to mobilize support for tough actions against the states lumped under this rubric. One consequence, however, was that it pushed policy makers toward a one-size-fits-all strategy of containment and isolation. And why not, when they were all "rogue states"? This strategy came up against hard realities in two cases. The first was North Korea in 1994, when the Pyongyang regime's moves to develop nuclear weapons necessitated the Clinton administration to embark on what I would call "limited engagement by necessity."

The alternative to negotiating with the North Koreans in the face of their advanced nuclear program was either economic sanctions or a military strike on their nuclear facilities, neither of which would have ended North Korea's nuclear program. Indeed, either of those options could have triggered a general war in the Korean Peninsula. Given the absence of any better alternative, the Clinton administration very reluctantly pursued limited engagement with North Korea. Critics charged that the administration was pursuing a policy of appeasement with North Korea.

The second case in which the rogue-state policy ran up against hard realities occurred in May 1997, when the election of a reformist president in Iran changed political conditions substantially and prompted a reassessment in the U.S. government, including a declared openness to engaging in some type of dialogue with Iran. This led to the Clinton administration's decision to drop the rogue-state rubric in June of last year and to pursue differentiated strategies.

Critics charged that the shift to the infelicitous term -- "states of concern" -- was an Orwellian word game, political spin to cover a policy of engaging problem actors in the international system. I would argue that it was not some politically correct obsession with language, but rather, a utilitarian response to changed circumstances. It also permitted a shift in focus from a unilateral American concept, to a focus on violations of agreed international norms. This provided greater opportunity for me United States to develop multilateral support for its policies.

The Bush administration has revived the term principally in the context of national missile defense to mobilize political support for that major strategic system. In this context, the term rogue state carries the connotation of "crazy" state, an undeterrable regime that traditional diplomacy cannot address -- thus the need for an active ballistic missile defense. But I think this is a dubious assumption. Saddam Hussein may have been ruthlessly expansionist, but he was not irrational. We need to understand the strategic rationale of these regimes and the dynamics of deterrence, with respect to Iraq, Iran and the other hard cases that are of concern.

The alternative to the generic rogue-state approach does not mean blanket engagement of odious regimes, but rather engagement with those hard cases where it's appropriate. The key question is, under what conditions is limited engagement within the context of an overall, comprehensive containment approach appropriate? I'd suggest two criteria. The first is a national security imperative of the kind that existed in the spring 1994 in the face of the mature North Korean nuclear program, a plutonium machine heading out of control. The second condition is a change in political circumstance, in which something is going on inside the target state and there is someone to engage. One could contrast Iraq, where politics essentially does not exist, where insulting the president is punishable by death, to Iran in the Khatami era, where everyone agrees something is going on, although there are differences of view on exactly what it means. These contrasting political circumstances warrant differentiating U.S. strategies.

The Atlantic Council has offered useful recommendations on how the United States can promote a positive change in Iran's civil society. The Iranian specialist Shahram Chubin has argued that the question should not be, can Khatami deliver, but rather, what can the United States do to increase his possibilities for success? A judgment about recommendations such as those contained in the Atlantic Council report will thus hinge on one's reading of what's going on inside the target state and whether actions by outside actors can help influence those events. The cleavage in our debate on Iran really revolves around different assessments on these key issues.

I am not advocating a specific policy; that will rely on sound target-state analysis. Rather, I have focused on the continued link between the dual-containment approach and the rogue-state policy. It will be difficult to break out of dual containment and to pursue differentiated approaches towards these countries as long as the rogue-state policy remains part of the U.S. foreign-policy lexicon. The contrasting political conditions in Iran and Iraq call for differentiated strategies. Enormous political obstacles are there. But the revival of the rogue-state approach will hinder the Bush administration's ability to implement differentiated strategies in response to changing political circumstances. The revival of the rogue-state approach may very well stand in the way of its own policies towards these countries.

GARY SICK, senior research scholar, adjunct professor of international affairs, acting director, Middle East Institute, Columbia University; executive director, Gulf/2000

The traditional strategic view of the Persian Gulf is that it is a triangle with Iran, Iraq and the Gulf Cooperation Council as its three points. Recently we had to include a fourth point: The United States has become a permanent major player, and the region now must be considered a strategic quadrangle.

There are several historical points that need to be mentioned in thinking about the security issues in the region. One of those was the U.S. twin-pillar policy starting in 1972, which was a way for the United States to avoid taking direct responsibility for security developments in the region and to turn it over to our friends -- Saudi Arabia and especially Iran. Second, in 1973 Arab use of the oil boycott created the perception of oil as a strategic weapon. This has shaped the thinking of a generation of Western strategists regarding the Persian Gulf.

The twin-pillar policy collapsed in 1979 with the Iranian revolution, and the question became how to replace the pillar that was no longer there. One part of that was the enunciation of the Carter Doctrine: Any attempt by an outside power to control the region would be regarded as an assault on U.S. vital interests and would be repelled by any means necessary. That actually created for the first time a clear sense that the United States was prepared to go it alone, to take on the issues of the Gulf directly. And that in turn led to a set of policies, including a military policy. It started with the RDJTF (rapid deployment joint task force), which then led to CENTCOM. Now we have the Fifth Fleet and a very large permanent military presence.

The policy was slow taking off, but during the Iran-Iraq War the United States found itself slowly sucked into that regional conflict in a way that it had not prepared for previously, particularly when Kuwait asked us to reflag a number of tankers in 1987. When we agreed to that, we also agreed in effect to provide the necessary infrastructure to support the ships and planes and military forces that were protecting the tankers going in and out of the Gulf. Then, with Desert Storm in 1991, the United States became the unquestioned military, political and economic hegemon in the region.

U.S. primacy, of course, was doubled because of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Prior to the 1990s, we had always cast our strategic objectives in the Gulf as, first, to maintain the free flow of oil, and, second, to prevent the Soviets from taking control or exerting undue influence over those resources that were so important to us. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the external power addressed in the Carter Doctrine became an inside power. We changed our policy from opposing Soviet encroachment in the region to opposing Saddam Hussein's encroachment in the region. And that became the pivotal element of our policy.

After Desert Storm, U.S. policy shifted to unilateralism. It was U.S. unilateralism that led to the enunciation of the dual-containment policy. That policy explicitly said that the United States no longer had to rely on allies in the region and could take care of the security situation all by itself. It did not need the balance-of-power game that had been played in the past, in which the United States allied with the GCC states while balancing Iran against Iraq or vice versa. That was no longer necessary. We were able to go it alone. We had multilateral sanctions on Iraq. We had unilateral sanctions on Iran despite our allies' objections. And we had close military cooperation with the GCC, particularly after the war. They were prepared to cooperate with us in ways that they had not before.

Where does that leave us today? We have a new strategic situation in which Saddam Hussein remains in power despite our best efforts. Iran is becoming more nationalist and moderate, but is unpredictable. And threats to the GCC, instead of coming from the outside, probably come from within their own borders. I would also argue that oil is no longer such a strategic commodity. It is freely traded on the spot market. It is much less likely today that the Arab states in the region are going to use it as a strategic weapon.

In view of the fundamental changes of regional circumstances and U.S. policies, especially over the past decade, I have been interested in looking at the policies of the new Bush administration. Specifically I recommend to you Vice President Cheney's report on energy policy. Most of it is about domestic issues, but tucked away at the very end, it does talk about international aspects. I really found the report disappointing. Although it does not use the words "dual containment," it fails to even mention Iran or Iraq as factors affecting U.S. policy in the Gulf. It acknowledges that the Gulf is important to U.S. energy policy, but it provides no clue about the direction of future policy. On the whole, I found the report shallow, evasive and unsatisfying. I hope that this report doesn't represent the best thinking in the administration. It's time for some creative new thinking on the Persian Gulf, and thus far we haven't had it.

THOMAS STAUFFER, international energy consultant

Broadening the box, I suppose, in the Washington sense means incorporating the sixth floor into seventh-floor thinking. I'd like to broaden it somewhat farther and look at us and our policy as our prospective allies or non-allies might look at it. This is particularly critical vis-a-vis sanctions, because the reality of one's objectives can best be tested against other people's perceptions of those objectives and reactions to them. Are the targets clear? Do we depend upon cooperation?

Cooperation is critical because sanctions if not multilateral are almost doomed to fail. I can't think of a counterexample. So the perspectives of our allies become awfully important, because this will govern the multilateral feasibility so critical to the effectiveness of the sanctions.

Secondly, the consistency of our policy becomes a test for our prospective allies, and the credibility of the United States is also affected by this perception of consistency or inconsistency. Our allies want to know what we're up to before they'll help us.

The internal inconsistencies in U.S. policy are serious. Our track record is our political albatross, particularly with regard to sanctions, but more broadly in any context where we need multilateral support. We have paid diplomatic costs for this. And it's important vis-a-vis the Europeans, for example, because they have memories. Our diplomats come and go; the files are burned for security reasons; diplomatic tours are short; our counterparts remember what we did, and we are accountable for it.

Let me take the case of the Russian gas pipelines to Europe in the late '70's and early '80's. We were urging the Europeans not to take gas from the Soviet Union because we were concerned about their energy security. We didn't want them to rely on gas from an insecure, unreliable source. Russian intelligence gleefully leaked to the Norwegians and the Germans that at the same time the United States was arguing its concern for energy security in Europe, we were also telling the Russians that if they issued enough extra exit permits for Russian Jews, we would forget our opposition to the pipeline. That hurt. It is an incident that many of the younger diplomats today in Europe still remember or have learned about.

There was an earlier episode that also proved embarrassing. We were trying to get the Europeans to consider sanctions against the Russians for the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Then suddenly one morning, the Europeans learned in the newspapers that we had just negotiated a huge wheat-sale deal with the Russians.

Starting in 1979, we imposed arms embargoes on deliveries of weapons to Iran. This was fine except for the fact that there was a gaping hole in this system, which the American public never learned about. The Israelis were taking advantage of this to sell our equipment and to broker other countries' arms into Iran at very high markups.

I had an extraordinary meeting once with an Iranian minister in Geneva who had studied in the States and knew American curse words better than I did. The thrust of his point was, why do you make us buy from the Israelis at a 400-percent markup? We'll buy from you directly at 50 percent more. The Europeans, of course, knew that the Israelis were selling arms in spite of the U.S. embargo. And they knew that we knew. This became doubly insulting to the Europeans at the same time that it indicated that the U.S. agenda was different than what we were trying to peddle to them. These inconsistencies are beginning to haunt us more and more.

What are our rationales for sanctions at this point? One is aggression against one's neighbors. We sanctioned Iraq but we don't sanction the Israelis. Human-rights violations. We raise this issue vis-a-vis Burma and we were conspicuously silent in the Ceaucescu days in Romania. Nuclear proliferation. We sanctioned Pakistan, but we've been very silent about the Israelis -even though we know that they stole our design data to boot.

These inconsistencies in our posture make it very difficult to convince people that they should join in what appears to be a moral or humanitarian undertaking. If we look at weapons of mass destruction, we've sanctioned Iraq and Pakistan but indulged Israel and de facto India.

On invasions, Iraq has been sanctioned, but we have been remarkably quiet about the Chinese invasion of Tibet and, of course, the Israeli occupation of several of its neighbors. On human rights, we asked the world to join us in sanctioning Iraq, but we have been conspicuously silent in the cases of Guatemala and Israel. We argue about Iraq's mistreatment of the Kurds, but we are silent about Turkey, whose behavior the EU feels strongly about. When we come to the chemical-biological warfare threat, we worry about Iraq and Libya and, again, wink at the Israelis. This is a concern for anyone who might want or consider joining with us because it raises the question of what the real U.S. agenda is. Is the real agenda one our allies would share?

This further reaches into the oil sector and, as Gary pointed out, not in the usual sense of security, but rather in a different aspect of access. The United States is perceived as keeping other countries out of profitable, lucrative and strategically important oil concessions in the Middle East. We've tried without success to restrict the Europeans, the Japanese, the Canadians, even the Malaysians from operating in Libya, Iran and the Sudan. We've been successful in keeping them out of Iraq. But Iraq is literally the crown jewel in the oil world today. There are six million barrels a day of easily developable new incremental production available to whoever is willing to break the sanctions. The temptations are increasingly great.

These are the kinds of costs we incur for lack of consistency. There's a Cartesian dilemma here. French diplomats used to agonize over trying to figure out how U.S. policy in the Middle East reflected U.S. national interests. They simply couldn't come up with a logic. So their arguments would do justice to Jesuitical debates in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. But we have failed. And the failure there highlights what you might call "the gulf in the Gulf." The gulf in perceptions of priorities in the Gulf being between ourselves and, in particular, the Europeans. DeGaulle once described this very figuratively when he said, "The United States has beshat the nest in the Middle East and expects us to live in it."

The perceptions and concerns are radically different, making multilateralism extremely difficult. But without multilateral efforts sanctions are very difficult to implement successfully. The failure of our efforts to create a multilateral consensus means that we become unilateral. And by becoming unilateral we are increasingly committing acts of self-mutilation.

Our political alienation from several countries in the Middle East costs us approximately 500,000-700,000 jobs. But those workers are in a sense disenfranchised. There's no lobby reflecting them. And companies cannot really effectively lobby for the Middle East because it's too small as part of their global operations. They don't have the kind of fundamental stake in Middle Eastern issues that the Israeli lobby does. There's really no corporate lobby to counter the Israeli lobby. And there's no American lobby in this country.

The perception today among Europeans has changed radically. Twenty years ago, they didn't understand the importance of the flow of money in U.S. policy, whether domestic or foreign. Today they do. And to understand U.S. policy and sanctions, you have to follow the money trail.

Q&A

Q: What could the United States do to make it possible for Khatami to be more forthcoming?

DR. LITWAK: The Iranians have not made it any easier in the last nine months for the U.S. administration to pursue an engagement policy toward them. One of the key impediments is Iran's implacably hostile attitude toward the Arab-Israel peace process. We have been looking at what Iranian leaders say and looking at what they do -- and debating whether what they say really reflects some core beliefs or whether it's used for mobilization purposes in their domestic context.

It's one of the core objectives of U.S. policy to prevent WMD proliferation. The inconsistencies in U.S. nonproliferation policy have been pointed out. It is a universal norm, but still we're more concerned about some countries than others. That concern reflects our reading of intentions, what they might do with those capabilities. A Saddam Hussein who has invaded two neighbors and has used chemical weapons against his own people and in a war with Iran is viewed differently than other cases where proliferation has occurred, such as in India.

A lot of the Iranian declaratory language is focused on Israel, and they are making some efforts through the Shahab-3 and 4 to develop capabilities that could hit Israel. But, presumably the core consideration for Iran's leaders, from a security perspective, is Iraq. If there were to be a U.S. dialogue with Iran, security issues should be part of that, because I don't think that proliferation in the Middle East is inevitable. There are core motivations underlying proliferation. What we do can help to shape those motivations. The fact that Iran lives next door to Iraq and has been on the receiving end of WMD shapes their perspective. But there is a debate within Iran on how it will go on WMD. If we ever do have a dialogue with Iran on security, it should incorporate the Iranian leaders' perception of the neighborhood they live in and what they need to do to ensure their own security.

DR. SICK: There have really been two huge missed opportunities over the last ten years. The first was that after the death of Khomeini and the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran was prepared for dialogue in a variety of ways and they began sending us signals. They were even prepared to take some fairly concrete steps. That was never followed through because we adopted this policy to wall them off, to have nothing to do with them. We missed our opportunity. Now I think the United States has come to the conclusion that a dialogue with Iran would, in fact, be a useful thing. And Iran is tied up in its own domestic politics in such a way that it's not prepared to make a gesture in our direction. This is our second great missed opportunity. It doesn't have to stay that way forever, but at the moment it's hard to look at the situation and see a clear breakthrough point. I don't think that's in the cards in the immediate future unless Iran can begin to get its own internal house in order. At the moment, having the United States and Israel as an enemy is very useful to them for domestic political purposes, just as Iran is occasionally useful to us for domestic political purposes. This is the place where I have a tremendous amount of respect for the Atlantic Council report because what it says is, under these circumstances we should look at our own interests. We should look at U.S. national interests and follow those in a clear-eyed way while this situation resolves itself.

DR. STAUFFER: What's in it for Iran to appear to make any concessions to us? What are the adverse consequences of the present situation for Iran vis-a-vis the United States? We owe them somewhere between $6-30 billion, but, otherwise, what's in it for them?

DR. SICK: I think what's in it for them is a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval for foreign investment -- that if the United States is prepared to come in and make investments in Iran or to not oppose investments in Iran -- that's worth a lot. I think it's something that Iranians have to take very seriously. It's something that they fully understand, although it's not clear that they're prepared to pay a high price for it. I think that's true in the case of the United States regarding Iran: there are certain outcomes we would like to see, but we're not prepared to pay a political price. Iran is still pretty much in that same status.

DR. LITWAK: I discussed the conditions under which the United States might consider limited engagement of a problem state, one of these hard cases we have been talking about. I think the motivation from Iran parallels that. The first condition would be a national-security imperative. Such an imperative existed for Iran in the mid 1980s, when it was losing the war with Iraq and, as a consequence, reached out to the United States and Israel -- the Great Satan and the Lesser Satan -- for arms supplies. The second condition is some economic imperative of the kind you see in North Korea, where economic distress pushes the regime to reach out to the world.

Some experts point to Iran's poor economic performance as a motivation for the regime to normalize relations with the outside world, including the United States. But that cuts against the core linkage between domestic and foreign policy in Iran -- the centrality of the issue of relations with the United States, how loaded that question is in terms of what the revolution means, its elan, etc. If economic conditions were worse in Iran, one could posit there would be increased pressure on the regime to normalize relations with the United States.

Another key point to note is the shift in the debate because of the performance of President Khatami over the last year or two. This question of whether Khatami can deliver did recede early in his tenure. But recently, even among his supporters, some questions have been raised about his own intentions because of his hesitancy to politically challenge the theocratic hard-liners. This has put back on the table the question of whether Khatami is unable to deliver because of the intractable power struggle within that country -- or is just not interested in delivering. Among experts, that question is at the heart of the debate on Iran. It's that analysis, which, I think, has to feed into the policy debate here about whether or not recommendations of the kind the Atlantic Council is making are appropriate.

Q: What actions might be appropriate at the upcoming WTO ministerial meeting in Qatar, which is right in the middle of the Gulf? It's one of the final sessions of the WTO talks; certainly there will be a lot of money talking. I can't imagine that a WTO meeting in Qatar will be able to ignore the issues of reconstruction in Iraq post-sanctions, whether we're talking about the Kurdish area or the rest of the country.

DR. SICK: Maybe my imagination is better than yours, but I think they can avoid talking about that. They have for many years, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they avoid it this time as well.

DR. LITWAK: Who's responsible for the suffering of the Iraqi people? Who can make it stop? Saddam Hussein's responsible. If you follow the money, you see it in Saddam's network of opulent palaces around Iraq. The State Department website shows where a lot of this money is going. But Saddam has won the propaganda war, and the pressure is now on the states that can make it stop, not on the person who is responsible for it. That puts the international pressure on the United States and Britain.

At least in the United States, no one is talking about engaging Saddam Hussein. Other states in the region and powers on the Security Council may be talking about normalizing relations with Iraq. I don't know what that means. But it could mean giving Saddam Hussein the checkbook again. And then he'll be back in business. We know from UNSCOM that he is in a position to reconstitute his WMD relatively quickly. And we know from the experience of the '80s that the Iraqis are experts at circumventing controls on dual-use technologies. He spent $8 billion before the Gulf War to try every known method of fabricating highly enriched uranium for a nuclear-weapons program. Now with hundreds of tons of unsecured fissile material in the former Soviet Union, there are ways in which Saddam can procure this key component without having to invest in the nuclear-fuel cycle.

I'm not sanguine at all about smart sanctions. It's making the best of a bad situation. But the Gulf region must get serious with outside powers about keeping the checkbook out of Saddam's hand and maintaining high barriers on dual-use technologies that might permit him to reconstitute a WMD threat to the region.

Q: Under the structure of the government of the Islamic Republic, Khatami doesn't have any power to effect change. He may want change, and he has support inside Iran, but he doesn't have authority.

DR. SICK: This represents a very important point of view. Khatami is a cleric. This is a group of clerics who are untrustworthy; they have a bad history, and Khatami has no real power. There's no one to deal with there. The only way it is going to be resolved is to overthrow the regime. I respect this view, but I don't believe it. I think that people coming from that perspective fail to identify even what good things have been done. If you look at the last presidential election, the fact that it was able to mobilize people was not a small achievement. Even the conservatives who were running against Khatami had to use his language. He has transformed the nature of political discourse in Iran. He has succeeded in changing the entire nature of the Majlis; in the last election in the year 2000, three out of four people in the Iranian Majlis were kicked out. The old-timers were replaced with reformers.

He succeeded in identifying the rogue elements in the Ministry of Intelligence and in replacing the head of the intelligence service. That's not a small thing. Does that mean that he has a full array of powers that he can draw upon to determine the way the things turn out? No, it does not. There is going to be a debate that will continue, and we don't know what the outcome is going to be. There is a significant struggle going on. I would simply disagree that all of this is irrelevant, that what we see in the form of elections, of changes of personalities, in Iran are meaningless simply because Khatami doesn't have sufficient power to dominate the situation and force the leader, for instance, to do certain things. We're going to have to wait and see how he handles himself in a second term. I can't predict that, but I will not accept the view that there's nothing to even talk about here.