Michel Singh's Bad Advice on Iran

The New York Times has published an editorial by Michael Singh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and, during G.W. Bush's second term, former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council. Singh apparently hopes to convince the Obama Administration to adopt a posture that Bush rejected, hoping that Obama will demand a degree of capitulation from Iran that the government would see as a humiliation and lock himself into taking military action of Iran does not capitulate.

The reasons for failure in all the approaches share a common thread: Iran shrank from any broad bilateral thaw because it feared engagement with the United States more than it feared confrontation.

“Resistance” to the West — and especially to the United States — was a founding principle of Iran’s Islamic regime. And while Iran has gradually normalized relations with many European and Asian allies of Washington, it has not done so with the United States itself, just as it has not with America’s ally Israel. To lose those two nations as enemies would be to undermine one of the regime’s ideological raisons d’être.

In other words, according to Singh, the U.S. has any number of allies who are able to reach out to Iran, but that Iran is going to reflexively reject engagement with the United States. Singh complains that the present round of sanctions are not likely to accomplish more than we've already seen. He complains that Iran's compliance with Israeli and U.S. "red lines" on its nuclear program allow it to control when those nations might launch a military attack.

He concludes that the U.S. should negotiate a new track of negotiations with Iran, outside of the current multilateral talks, to address all of the issues with Iran that trouble the United States. He also proposes that we arm-twist our allies to toughen their sanctions on Iran, never mind what that might mean for the progress or outcome of current talks, while telling Iran that they'll support any military action the U.S. chooses to take, while supporting Iranian dissident groups. I suspect that Singh hopes that such a move would cause Iran to walk away from the bargaining table. While pretending to be concerned that "whoever is on the Iranian side actually comes ready to bargain" his actual concern appears to be that Iran will reach an agreement - one of the type he describes as "a narrow technical accord rather than a more fundamental reorientation".

In short, Singh appears to be arguing that the U.S. should pressure the states presently negotiating with Iran to increase sanctions in a manner that is likely to poison any progress. Despite expressing that any such move would trigger reflexive Iranian opposition, he proposes that the U.S. submit to Iran a list of grievances that it wants addressed through separate talks, a move that is likely to undermine the multilateral talks (because Singh clearly wants the U.S. to insist upon concessions that he does not believe will result from a negotiated agreement) while demanding concessions far beyond what anybody (including, and perhaps especially, Singh) believes Iran would find acceptable even if not demanded by the United States. He appears to hope that the U.S. demand will be a new "red line" for military action, or that the collapse of negotiations likely to result from new demands, new sanctions, and new threats would leave the U.S. with "no choice" but to attack Iran.

The question of how to handle states such as Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, nations that have significant military power and nuclear technology and are hostile to the United States, is not one that lends itself to easy answers. I may be reading too much of a subtext into Singh's argument. Perhaps he truly believes that a nation he paints as likely to reflexively reject any such effort will suddenly become pliant and cooperative if we thump our chest hard enough and make enough threats. But to me, it seems like Singh hopes to create a context in which the United States paints itself into a corner, either having to look like Iran called its bluff or go to war, and that he's hoping for war. Singh might argue that there's a chance that his approach would work - that unlike every other regime in recent history that has faced a similar set of threats and despite his own characterization of its leadership, Iran will capitulate. But it's a "Wish in one hand, crap in the other" scenario - the odds of Iranian capitulation are vanishingly small, such that Singh's proposal is best regarded as a sure path to war.

The Purpose of Sanctions Against Iran is.... What?

I know, I know. Sanctions are supposedly going to convince the Iranian government to give up a nuclear weapons program that it claims it's not pursuing. Nobody believes Iran, so I guess the theory is that if economic sanctions keep piling up Iran will eventually have to deal with corrupt individuals and nations to export its oil despite the sanctions give up its nuclear weapons program. And we'll know that the sanctions worked because of their long and consistent record of failure because Iran will announce that it will have given up its nuclear weapons program and, when that time comes, for some reason its denials will suddenly seem credible. Or something like that.

I'm reminded of another nation which, after many years of economic sanctions, a militarily imposed "no fly zone", and the like, was the subject of an invasion to end its quest for "weapons of mass destruction". For a number of reasons, some quite valid, the invading nations had discounted the nation's denials of having WMD's and engaged in demagoguery about the risk posed by their non-existent weapons and non-existent delivery vehicles. After invasion we learned that the nation had abandoned its programs to develop such weapons but, you know, why worry about a wasted $trillion or two and a decade of occupation, or whether eventual blowback might make the nation or region even more dangerous - we found out for sure.

That situation was, of course, completely different. The nation's name ended with a q.

Seriously, what is Iran to conclude from the behavior of western nations? The principal lesson seems to be that if they claim to have abandoned a nuclear weapons program they won't be believed, that if they allow massive inspections of their territory they will be accused of having secret sites that they have not disclosed, and that sanctions will continue to pile up until the western world announces that the burden of maintaining the sanctions is too high and it's time to invade. (If Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it's difficult to imagine that anything short of an invasion will give any amount of certainty that it has been eliminated.) Or they can act like North Korea - develop an actual nuclear weapon. You may not get rid of the sanctions but you will significantly reduce and eventually all-but-eliminate the threat of military action. (If there's a different lesson they are likely to draw, not from the theory of sanctions but from the past behavior of western nations, please feel free to share it in the comments.)

I guess I'm just not seeing the benefit of pushing Iran to the point that it has nothing to lose by building nuclear weapons and demonstrating that it is a nuclear power. That's not the purpose of the sanctions, and I'm sure the proponents of layering misery upon misery on the Iranian people have somehow convinced themselves that "this time truly is different" and that the sanctions will "work", but at a certain point Iran will be left with nothing to lose by becoming a nuclear power - and potentially a lot to gain if it can remove a military threat from the equation. And I'm not sure how far we presently are away from that point.