Unclenching the American Fist Toward Iran

"If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us," President Barack Obama said upon assuming the presidency, and this phrase has become a new mantra in Washington: If only the mad mullahs would play with us, we would be ready and willing.

But the "clenched fist" metaphor is misleading, and, more important, the attitude it signals may prevent actual progress in U.S.-Iran relations.

Obama has certainly changed the tone of White House rhetoric about the Islamic republic. This is welcome and necessary. His vow to engage with respect and without threats is particularly bracing. It's a first step among many to free U.S. policy from 30 years of failure toward Iran, a policy based on coercion, sanctions, military threats, covert action and relentless insults instead of actual diplomacy.

The prevailing political atmosphere, however, remains stuck on hoary tropes that will continue to impede progressive policy.

A New York Times editorial on April 24 signals the conventional view: "The logic of [Obama's] Iran strategy is to give Tehran a chance to come in from the cold with offers of engagement and economic and security incentives. If Tehran does not take him up on the offer -- early signs are not hopeful -- he must build support for tougher international sanctions to constrain Iran's nuclear program."

Most apparent is the fervent attention to Iran's nuclear program. Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson describes this as "nuclear orientalism," our reflexive belief that nuclear development in the Third World is inherently alarming. It draws from a longstanding habit, he writes, "where 'we' are rational and disciplined, 'they' are impulsive and emotional; where 'we' are modern and flexible, 'they' are slaves to ancient passions and routines; where 'we' are honest and compassionate, 'they' are treacherous and uncultivated."

And so we are incessantly told that Iran, with its program to enrich uranium, is obstreperous, even treacherous, toward global nuclear norms. The Israelis are vowing to strike Iran's nuclear facilities because it is the most dangerous threat facing the world, they say.

The Israel lobby, led by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), tirelessly inveighs against Iran's "nuclear ambitions" and the "cascade of instability" it purportedly brings.

"When we talk about engagement with Iran, do not be in any way confused," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in Jerusalem in March. "Our goal remains the same: to dissuade and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and continuing to fund terrorism."

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the Senate that "The regional and nuclear ambitions of Iran continue to pose enormous challenges to the U.S.," and, later, that he preferred tighter sanctions to diplomacy.

The Israelis have gone so far as not only to threaten an attack on Iran, but to use Iran's nuclear program as an excuse to refuse negotiations with Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, adding to the "red line" restraints delivered to Clinton on what Israel would allow in U.S. policy toward Iran, is insisting that all regional issues are trumped by the fissionable atom (Iran's prospective ones, that is, not Israel's own arsenal of 200 nuclear weapons).

So Iran's "nukes" are Topic A in this new administration, emotionally and politically charged. Negotiations with Iran must first take up the "nuclear file," everyone seems to agree, as the sine qua non of engagement. Iran must stand down from its recalcitrant, clenched-fist attitude about its nuclear program, or nothing can improve. It's carrots and sticks -- juicier carrots and sharper sticks, as Dennis Ross, the former WINEP honcho and now a special adviser in the State Department, has put it. The carrot is engagement, the sticks more sanctions or other, nastier forms of coercion.