Iran 317

The Economist held a debate this week on whether the world would be safer if Iran was bombed. The on-line debate was held between General Chuck F. Wald and Dr Emily Landau, with expert statements provided by Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington, and myself.

My statement, questioning the very basis of the debate, can be found below.

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/447

Trita Parsi, PhD

****************

http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/447

The question posed by the house captures perfectly the problem with the debate on Iran in the West. It embodies a decade-old approach to Iran that reduces this major country into a single variable problem, Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Every non-nuclear development is either viewed from the prism of the nuclear programme, or is simply ignored.

This paradigm is arguably the danger we should focus on. It is an outlook that makes us blind to historic developments before our eyes that have the potential to redefine the Middle East in ways that neither George W. Bush's regime-change policies nor President Barack Obama's outreach ever could do. Since we appear incapable of imagining the impact of the Iranian pro-democracy movement on nuclear matters, either assuming that the Iranian people will get crushed by the Ahmadinejad government or that their victory would be inconsequential, we carry on our analysis of Iran as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred in Iran over the past seven months. It is the triumph of theory over reality.

Mindful of the above, and with the many wars the United States already is involved in the region, one should be forgiven for thinking that the house may perhaps have posed its question out of bad habit rather than proper analysis.

There are many oft-repeated reasons why a bombing campaign would not make the world safer: the logistical difficulties of successfully destroying Iran's known facilities, the implausibility of successfully destroying Iran's unknown facilities, America's lack of capacity to sustain a third front in the Middle East, the unpredictable regional repercussions, the short-lived security even a successful campaign would achieve since it would at most push back the Iranian programme a few years, the likelihood that a military campaign would cause Iran to withdraw from the non-proliferation treaty and cancel all IAEA inspections, and the near-certainty that even a successful bombing campaign would produce a vengeful and nuclear armed Iran a few years down the road.

But after the historical events of the past few months, in which a popular democratic movement has expanded in numbers across broadening swathes of the population while the Iranian regime has continued to shrink, the questions that must take centre stage are first, the impact a democratic Iran would have on international security as a whole, beyond just the nuclear issue; and second, the impact a military campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities would have on the prospects of a democratic victory in Iran.

A military campaign against Iran would be the death knell of a pro-democracy movement whose potential to change Iran's internal and external behaviour should not be underestimated. Rather than giving the Iranian green movement the space to breathe and grow, we would kill it in its infancy and pay for the consequences for decades to come. We would deliver on a silver plate what the Ahmadinejad government has itself failed to achieve even after seven months of brutal repression and subjugation; the silencing of the Iranian people's desire for universal rights and proper representation.

Unfortunately, there is precedence for this. In 1953, we viewed the world through the prism of the cold war. All developments and all options were assessed in the context of America's rivalry with the Soviet empire. The long-term impact of our actions on our relations with individual states mattered little. Consequently, America convinced itself that a CIA coup against Iran's first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, and the reinstallation of the Shah's brutal dictatorship would lie in its interest, because it seemed to make sense in the context of the cold war.

The coup set off a series of event that eventually led to the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the victory of a brutal, anti-American theocracy that the US government now accuses of being close to producing nuclear weapons. Till this day, America is paying for the mistake of 1953, which was born out of an unwillingness to assess international challenges from more than one perspective.

This mistake should not be repeated. Trading in the potential for a democratic Iran for the slight chance of a brief setback in Iran's nuclear programme makes little sense, particularly when the Obama administration maintains that Iran will not be able to achieve credible breakout capacity for at least another 18 months, if not two or three years.

The real question, therefore, is not whether bombing Iran will make the world safer but whether a nuclear-obsessed policy will deny the world the opportunity to gain security through a democratic Iran while ensuring another decade of endless war.