Unclenching the American Fist Toward Iran

By John Tirman, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2009.

This is a recipe for more failure. Iran is not going to give up its enrichment program, this seems apparent. U.S. intelligence has maintained for at least 18 months that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program. It is possible that the enrichment program could be curtailed, and indeed Iran has promised to bring forth a new proposal next month, though it's doubtful that a "no new centrifuges" policy will satisfy the hawks in Israel or Washington.

The Obama administration may have tragically misread Iran's interests, as every president has -- "tragic" because opportunities to improve the relationship are rare, and allowing our own obsessions to frame this singular diplomatic opening is possibly a colossal blunder. The nuclear issue needs to be put on the back burner. Other actions should come first, and, if successful, the nuclear controversy will be easier to resolve.

Why would Iran want nuclear weapons? Consider the map: They are surrounded by nuclear weapons states -- Israel, Pakistan, Russia and U.S. deployments in the region. Nuclear weapons, as we are often told, are the great equalizer, and Iran's security concerns are only too real: Iraq's Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against them while the "international community" stood mute. Bush and Israel threatened them repeatedly. Nuclear weapons would, in such reasoning, be an obvious option. They hedged against Saddam's WMD programs, and when he fell, they stopped their weapons development.

Not surprisingly, then, their frequent entreaty to the United States is for "security guarantees," which means, "don't attack us, don't overthrow our republic." Given such guarantees, and the actions that would persuade them of our sincerity, they are likely to seek cooperation over confrontation.

And the actions we could take are low-risk: lifting non-nuclear sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets and moving toward normal diplomatic relations. The sanctions, by any measure, are a failure. And the absurdity of not being able to speak directly to Iran is not only foolhardy but counterproductive. Our capacity to speak directly to the Soviets was one of the instruments that ended the Cold War.

So Obama and his advisers seem have the policy backwards. However welcome the new rhetoric from the president himself, the primary interest in the nuclear issue as the next step in the engagement is premature.

We need to do the other things first, and then the nuclear issue will follow suit. Demonstrate not only that we do not threaten Iran (and continue to block Israel's attempts to bomb Iran), but that we will stop the policies of strangulation. At the same time, Obama's vows on nuclear disarmament could go a long way toward fulfilling our obligations to global norms on nuclear weapons, which would provide Iran with more tangible evidence of our own good intentions.

Sooner or later, Iran will need to reciprocate, of course, but the United States, as the vastly more powerful nation and the one that until recently offered only a mailed fist, must take the conciliatory actions first.

We risk nothing and stand to gain so much -- in enhanced security for Iraq, Afghanistan and even Israel -- if we take these simple, if bold, steps.

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John Tirman is executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies, and author of the A New Approach to Iran.

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