Back to the Axis of Evil, This Time Without the Army

Kenneth M. Pollack's last book, "The Threatening Storm" (2002), made the case for invading Iraq a lot more eloquently than the Bush administration ever did and helped persuade some moderates who might not otherwise have supported the war to get behind it. In that book, Mr. Pollack argued not only that the United States should depose Saddam Hussein but also that it should go to war "the right way" - by dealing with Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism first, by restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and by building a large multinational coalition employing at least 250,000 troops.

In the wake of postwar revelations that Mr. Hussein did not possess stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was not on the verge of acquiring nukes, Mr. Pollack has become an increasingly vociferous critic of the Bush administration's rush to war. He has accused the administration of distorting intelligence estimates and criticized its execution of the war and postwar reconstruction as "reckless" and "often foolish." Now, in his latest book, "The Persian Puzzle," Mr. Pollack addresses the United States' relationship with one of Iraq's more troubling neighbors: Iran, another part (along with North Korea) of the "axis of evil" invoked by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address - a country that has supported terrorism, allegedly pursued nuclear weapons and tried to undermine regional stability and the Middle East peace process.

Mr. Pollack's recommendations for dealing with Iran turn out to be a lot less hawkish than the sort he proposed for Iraq in "The Threatening Storm." In these pages, he argues against invading Iran ("unless Iran commits some truly egregious act of aggression against the United States on the order of a 9/11-type attack"), calls for a flexible approach that would take into account fluctuations in Iranian foreign policy (caused by internal tensions in the country between hard-liners and pragmatists) and discusses the uses of containment and carrot-and-stick incentives.

The most noticeable omission in "The Persian Puzzle" has to do with Mr. Pollack's reluctance to analyze the consequences that the Iraq war has had on Iran and its regional ambitions - even though he notes in passing that one of the chief reasons the first Bush administration did not push to depose Mr. Hussein in 1991 was its concern that such a move would leave "a power vacuum in the region and no state to balance Iran."

The other high-profile omission in this volume concerns Mr. Pollack's failure to explain persuasively why he initially believed it was necessary to go to war against Iraq but feels containment can work with Iran (even when he writes that "with the demise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Iran," not Iraq, "is probably the world's worst state sponsor of terrorism").

What "The Persian Puzzle" does most effectively is put America's relationship with Iran into historical perspective. Mr. Pollack, who has spent the last 16 years studying Iran (as a C.I.A. analyst, as director for gulf affairs at the National Security Council and in his current capacity as director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution), argues that "understanding the history of U.S.-Iranian relations is absolutely essential to appreciate the nature of the problems we currently confront." This is not exactly a new notion; the scholar James A. Bill took on much the same subject in his 1988 book "The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations." But Mr. Pollack brings a nuanced and carefully reasoned, if sometimes debatable, approach to his exploration of the emotional baggage that both sides bring to the table today.

He provides the reader with a brief history of Iran, underscoring the ferocious xenophobia of Iranian leaders like Mohammed Mossadegh and Ayatollah Khomeini, while emphasizing how the country's experience as a pawn in the Great Game played by Russia and Great Britain during the 19th century nurtured Iranians' suspicion of foreign interference in their country's affairs. He discusses the tendency of the Iranian people - fed by centuries of weak and corrupt regimes - to resent and resist their rulers. And he reviews the many traumatic encounters between the United States and Iran over the last 50 years.

Like most observers, Mr. Pollack sees the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh as a defining moment for Iranian attitudes toward America. "What is most knotty for the United States," he writes, "is that the popular Iranian version of history portrays Mossadegh as a wildly popular prime minister forging a new, democratic Iran fully in command of its own destiny, who was overthrown by American agents to prevent Iran from achieving political and economic freedom."

Though he argues that this myth "embellished and exaggerated" American mistakes "to grandiose proportions," he adds that "there is a kernel of truth in it, and therein lies the rub; the United States did help to overthrow Mossadegh, and it was culpable in the establishment of the despotism of Mohammed Reza Shah that succeeded him."

Many Iranians, furious at the shah for a multitude of sins, from his creation of a repressive police state to his squandering of money on military equipment, blamed the United States, which they saw as "his ally or colonial 'master.' " Mr. Pollack, on his part, contends that "to the extent anyone was manipulating anyone, it was the shah who was manipulating the United States through his ability to influence oil prices," his monopoly over "strategic freedom of action in the gulf region" and "his control over virtually all of the information the United States received from his country."

Despite the fact that the failure to anticipate Ayatollah Khomeini's ascendancy was a historic blunder by the United States, Mr. Pollack curiously does not blame American policy makers this blind spot. "The shah brought the Iranian revolution on himself," he concludes: America's "greatest mistake was not in failing to prevent his fall but in following policies that made his fall so injurious to our interests."

For Americans, Mr. Pollack goes on, the defining moment in relations with Iran was the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, which "left a terrible scar on the American psyche" and which has remained the "elephant in the living room" of American policy toward Iran ever since.

"The hostage crisis made the United States look weak in the eyes of the world," he writes, "and weakness invites challenge. It seems fairly certain that this impression of weakness contributed to Iran's decision to challenge the United States in Lebanon in the 1980's and throughout the Persian Gulf in the 1980's and early 1990's; Iraq's decision to invade Kuwait in 1990 and then to remain there even after the United States committed 500,000 troops in 1991; Syria's willingness to challenge us in Lebanon in the 1980's; and possibly to other international confrontations that followed."

Can the United States and Iran overcome their bitter past? Or will their psychological scars heighten their already very real difficulties with each other? As Mr. Pollack sees it, Iran may currently be at a kind of hinge moment in history, where either the country could make "a transition to real democracy" or Islamist autocracy could solidify; where the nation could acquire nuclear weapons or embrace the concept of collective security; where it could demonstrate a greater openness toward the outside world or make a more concerted effort to shut it out.

Just how the United States deals with Iran at this crucial moment in time, he writes at the end of this informative and often useful volume, "may be the ultimate test of America's leadership in the new era that is dawning."

What a coincidence, he write a guest OpEd column on the same day his book is reviewed.

November 9, 2004 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR What the Mullahs Learned From the Neighbors By KENNETH M. POLLACK

Washington

A quarter-century ago this month, several hundred Iranian students seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking our Marines and diplomats hostage, and leaving Americans fuming and asking, "Why do they hate us?" Now, as the Bush administration prepares for its second term, Iran is again at the top the agenda, and we seem equally clueless as to how to approach it.

So how do we come up with a coherent plan for Iran? A good place to start would be by analyzing the smart moves and the many mistakes America made over the last 14 years with another member of the so-called Axis of evil: Iraq. There are some obvious similarities between the goals and methods of these two countries, and Iran learned a great deal from Iraq's efforts to deceive the international community about its weapons programs. If we are to meet the challenge from Iran, there are four main lessons to be learned:

Beware the siren song of easy regime change. Throughout the 1990's, many Americans claimed that Saddam Hussein's regime was so hated by the Iraqi people that merely committing our foreign policy to regime change, arming a small band of insurgents and perhaps providing them with air support would be enough to topple the government. In the end, of course, it required a full-scale ground invasion to do so, and even the size of that effort has proved inadequate.

Similarly, there is good evidence that most Iranians want a different form of government, but there is little evidence that they are ready to take up arms against their rulers. Most Iranians simply don't want to go through another revolution. While Iranians on the whole are probably the most pro-American Muslims in the region, they are also fiercely nationalistic. Given our experience in Iraq, we should assume they would resist any effort by America to interfere in their domestic affairs.

A diplomatic solution is far preferable to a military one. Though the problems America faces in Iraq today would likely be argument enough against invading another Middle Eastern state, there's another reason to hold off on attacking Iran: we do not have a realistic military option there. Our troops are spread thin, and Iran's Revolutionary Guards could mount a far more potent military insurgency than the rebels in Iraq. Nor do strategic air strikes on nuclear targets seem like a viable alternative. One lesson Iran learned from Iraq was to widely disperse its nuclear facilities, duplicate them, hide them and harden them. Today we do not know enough about Iran's nuclear network to know if a widespread air campaign could even set it back significantly, while we doubtless would face retaliation from Iran in the form of terrorist attacks and an all-out clandestine war by Iranian agents in Iraq.

A multilateral approach can produce results where a unilateral course may fail. The key element in Saddam Hussein's decision to give up his nonconventional weapons programs - or at least put them on ice - was the willingness of the French, Russians and Chinese to agree, in the wake of the Persian Gulf war, to a system of inspections and economic penalties built around the idea that sanctions would remain as long as the inspectors kept finding elements of the regime's illegal weapons programs. The problem came over the next decade, as these countries repeatedly broke ranks with America and Britain and the pressure on Baghdad abated, allowing Iraq to defy the inspectors and siphon billions of dollars from the United Nation oil-for-food program. By 2003, the perfidy of Iraq's friends on the Security Council was so apparent that it seemed likely Saddam Hussein would soon accomplish his goal of having the sanctions lifted or seeing them collapse.

Our dealings with Iran have shown similar tendencies. During the 1990's, the United States tried to change Iranian behavior by cutting off all commercial relations. It was a policy that was all sticks and no carrots. While these sanctions did accomplish important secondary objectives (like limiting Iran's military build-up), they failed to have much impact on the country's pursuit of nuclear weapons or support for terrorism. On the other hand, Europe and Japan pursued a policy of nothing but carrots: providing boatloads of aid and trade in the hope that it would somehow convince Tehran to behave itself. Of course, it did nothing of the kind.

If we and our allies ever want to force real changes by the mullahs - and give them a reason to slow or halt their nuclear program - we are going to have to agree to a multilateral approach that combines carrots and sticks. That means being ready to reward positive steps that Iran might take - including greater access to nuclear sites and diminishing support for terrorism - with immediate trade benefits, while simultaneously imposing tough sanctions for each step it takes in the wrong direction.

It's worth recalling that over the past 15 years we have seen Iran back down in the face of the threat of multilateral sanctions. In 2003, for example, the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed that Iran had a program for uranium enrichment. Convinced that the Europeans and Japan were serious about punishment, Iran agreed temporarily to suspend the program. (Not surprisingly, once the European threat faded, the program was restarted immediately.)

One of the goals of a balanced approach should be to convince Iran to accept a robust inspection program with a legitimate threat of sanctions to back it up. Here as well, the experience with Iraq should make us comfortable that if we can get such a system in place with Iran, it has a good chance of succeeding. Of course, the difference is that with Iraq we had Security Council resolutions that authorized comprehensive inspections, imposed draconian sanctions and permitted, under certain circumstances, the use of force. With Iran today, we have only the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty - a voluntary measure that allows inspectors to look only where the country allows them to look, does not actually prohibit the development of fissile material and carries only the vague threat of unspecified sanctions if the Security Council can agree on them. Only a coherent strategy among the United States, Europe and Japan will bring Iran to heel.

It is much easier to get our allies on board for punitive measures if we decide well in advance what will set them in effect. In our dealings with Iraq in the 1990's, we learned that the toughest negotiations were with our allies, not our adversary. Only once have the United States and Britain been able to convince our allies to back our demands that Saddam Hussein disarm - in 1991, at the end of the Persian Gulf War.

After that, the international inspectors and the security services of many countries repeatedly caught the Iraqis cheating, lying, smuggling prohibited goods, undermining the sanctions and otherwise violating their pledges time and again. But we were never again able to come to any agreement at the Security Council to sanction Iraq - let alone those countries that were violating the resolutions on Iraq.

The same pattern is even more likely to hold true for Iran, where the Europeans, Japanese, Russians and Chinese all do a great deal of business. This is why the threat of "referring" Iranian violations of the nonproliferation treaty to the Security Council is not much of a threat - it is unlikely that the Security Council will summon the courage to impose meaningful penalties on Tehran.

Instead, we have to lay down clear red lines that, if Iran chooses to cross them, would automatically set off pre-established multilateral sanctions. The violations could include Iran's deciding to resume production of uranium hexaflouride, a compound used in enriching nuclear fuel for weapons; starting new enrichment operations at the Natanz centrifuge facility; importing additional enrichment technology; constructing new enrichment or plutonium extraction plants; testing ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear warhead; and refusing to stop mining uranium domestically.

Looking at the Iraq example, the bottom line for Iran is that we have to act now, while we still have some options left that might persuade the mullahs in Tehran to slow or halt their nuclear program. But we must get our allies on board immediately, and get firm commitments from them should Iran go back on its word in the future. The last thing we want to do three or five or ten years from now is to be bickering at the Security Council while Iran joins the nuclear club.

Kenneth M. Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of the forthcoming "The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America."

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