The Problem of Iran

Iran has plagued the United States for the past 30 years. I would argue that Iran has declared war on us; we have simply not engaged in this war. Consider that in 1979 Iran seized our Embassy in Tehran (an act of war) and held hostage our diplomats (an act of war) for 444 days; through Iran’s direct funding of proxy groups 220 U.S. Marines were killed by a truck bomb in Lebanon when their barracks was bombed in 1983 (asymmetrical warfare); chants of “Death to America” have echoed in Tehran for 30 years; presently the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are actively working with various splinter groups to train, equip, fund and attack Coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Despite these “serious provocations,” every president since the 1979 Iranian Revolution (Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush) has failed to see Iran’s ruling mullahs for what they are: ruthless and determined enemies at war with the United States. Iran’s neighbors in the Middle East know this and fear Iran; that is why they are paralyzed to act. They would rather we and the Israelis take the brunt of Iran’s ire than to challenge them. These countries do not necessarily fear Iran taking direct military action against them, but rather that Iran will unleash proxies (such as Hamas and Hezbollah) in asymmetrical warfare against them, destabilizing their own populations, as has been done in Lebanon and Israel.

After several days of opposition protest against the “irregularities” of the recent presidential election in Iran, President Obama finally made a tepid statement of support for free and fair elections. In response, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said directly to President Obama, “You should know that if you continue (to criticize the repression of protestors) the response of the Iranian nation will be strong…The response of the Iranian nation will be crushing. The response will cause remorse.”

The New York Times reports that yesterday (July 7, 2009) “…Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his first televised address since Iran’s disputed elections, calling them the “freest” and “healthiest” in the world, while opposition leaders seeking to revitalize their movement demanded an end to the government crackdown and the release of hundreds of arrested protesters.” Yes, at the direction of Iran’s leadership, the same Revolutionary Guards actively working against us in Iraq are stepping up their brutal tactics to silence protestors and opposition groups within Iran – as indeed they have been doing since 1979.

Also yesterday, reports The Wall Street Journal, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen stated in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that Iran is within one to three years of building a nuclear weapon. Add to this the sobering fact that Iran already possesses and has tested missiles that can reach Israel and parts of Europe, and you can see why we and the rest of the world need to be concerned.

As I mentioned earlier, for the past three decades American presidents have been reaching out to Iran, both overtly and through back-channel communications, with offers of normalized relations, secret arms deals, apologies for past U.S. transgressions, etc., and it has yielded nothing. The clerics in charge are as theocratic and anti-American now as they were in 1979.

So, faced with an Iranian theocracy that supports international terrorism, barbarically represses opposition parties and is illegally pursuing nuclear weapons, what is an American president to do?

As I wrote in an earlier Red/Blue piece on U.S. foreign policy, we must use every instrument of national power in dealing with problems around the world; we cannot rule out anything. This is especially true when thinking about how to deal with a dangerous regime like Iran. Our response must necessarily be a combination of diplomacy, rallying allies to collective action, public support for freedom and openness, and yes, covert action aimed at regime change.

Dealing effectively with Iran exposes a multitude of very real and very hard problems that concern regional stability, nuclear material and devices, international oil supplies (beyond the Gulf – check a map and you’ll see that Iran is the strategic lynchpin for the trans-shipment of oil supplies in the Middle East, Central and South Asia, which include countries such as Russia, India and China), the drug trade and all matter of other issues in a volatile crossroads of the world with a number of fragile nation states.

There are no good choices; yet we must act. We cannot let things go on without actively managing the problem of Iran. We must act in concert with our allies in the region as well as the Europeans of course; but we must also find a role for China, India and Russia – as President Obama said in Moscow earlier this week.

Despite the fact that Iran is on the march, I draw a comparison to the Soviet Union, which under Brezhnev was on a similar expansionist effort throughout the 1970s. Like the Soviet Union, Iran is crumbling within both economically and socially.

Much as we did in Poland in the early 1980s, the United States needs to work with our allies and lead the world in response to the Iranian threat. In Poland, the United States, the British and the Catholic Church worked together in a multi-layered strategy to topple the existing Soviet puppet regime. Public statements of support for freedom of assembly and free elections were coupled with statements that framed the struggle in moral terms. This was supplemented with intelligence and covert financial assistance to prop up opposition groups and those friendly to the West. Today, we’d call this asymmetrical warfare. It worked. It can work again.