Obama Or McCain: Who's Really Underestimating Iran?
Before commencing his economic address in Chicago this morning, Sen. John McCain took a quick detour through Iran. Responding to remarks made in Oregon by Barack Obama on Sunday -- in which the likely Democratic nominee suggested that if Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan could talk to the titans of communism, perhaps the next president might want to talk to Tehran -- McCain once again thumped Obama's "inexperience and reckless judgment" for failing to accurately judge the threat posed by the Islamic Republic.
Leave aside for a moment logic which holds that the more powerful an enemy is, the more strenuously one should pretend not to notice it. By dinging Obama for underestimating Iranian power, McCain may have opened himself up to a debate he's in no position to win himself, according to experts and regional observers who say Iran's increased power in part due to the diplomatic freeze under the Bush administration -- the same policy McCain now favors on the campaign trail.
Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, said recent events in Lebanon -- where Iranian-backed Hezbollah forces recently shut down the U.S.-backed government in Beirut without breaking a sweat -- are key to understanding America's current impotence in the face of growing Iranian influence.
"Lebanon is a great example of how this policy of [non-engagement] backfires," Khouri told The Huffington Post. "When the U.S. decides to rigorously ostracize Islamist movements that have some public or nationalist legitimacy, it's almost inevitably going to lose. ... The sad thing is that this posture is making the U.S. a more marginal player in many situations. More and more people around the world feel they can actively resist the United States. This generates a terrible backlash against the U.S. and really requires a serious re-think."
Vali Nasr, the Iran-born author of The Shia Revival and an expert on Middle Eastern affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations, says the problem even goes beyond the question of whether to talk to Iran or not about bilateral disputes. "It's not only that the United States has not engaged Iran, but that it has excluded Iran from a dialogue in every other arena in which it has an interest -- even in Afghanistan, where Iran is a neighbor," he said. "We haven't served ourselves well, because while Iran is clearly a stakeholder, they have no vested interest in cooperating. Consequently, not only hasn't it gotten us anything, it's made them more of a headache."
Not surprisingly, McCain national security adviser Max Boot sees it differently. Claiming there's nothing the United States can discuss with Iran "except the terms of our surrender," he nevertheless concedes that the recent Hezbollah offensive in Lebanon represents a "limited victory" for Iran. But Boot, who along with Nasr is member of the Council on Foreign Relations, rejects the notion that the Bush administration is at fault for Iran's newfound strength.
"Look, [Iran] has been fairly effective in terms of carving out a role for themselves by providing arms to Hamas and Hezbollah, and that's worked," he told The Huffington Post. "I don't really see what kind of leverage we could have to negotiate at this point. What would we give them? I think Sen. McCain is right when he says we have to turn up the heat, with diplomatic and economic action. Perhaps even military action if necessary."
Nasr, however, disputes Boot's claim that there are no potentially fruitful avenues of discussion. "The Bush administration's problem, and to an extent McCain's, is they think that there is a single silver bullet meeting to be had with the Iranians where you can come away with what you want. That's not the way it's going to happen. It's not the way it happened with China, or [in the Anbar Awakening] in Iraq, or any other conflict. The way it happens is with patience and strategy. And then we gradually and incrementally get things out of it."
In a perverse, self-defeating turn of events, Nasr says, America's refusal to talk to Iran may have left us ignorant about what its leaders might want from us. "The Washington feedback loop is just guessing about Iran," Nasr said, "because no one knows what they [Iran] want. The same things were said about the [Sunni] insurgent commanders in Iraq -- that you couldn't talk to them, they had American blood on their hands. And when General Petraeus adopted a more pragmatic strategy: Surprise, surprise! They did want something. The same thing happened in North Korea and Libya. Everywhere we've done this it's been a success."
Though Nasr doubts Iran will change its own aggressive stances in the last nine months of the Bush presidency, he believes a new administration will bring new opportunities to engage, if only on small matters at first. Similar opportunities may emerge after Iran holds its next presidential election in 2009. As the Washington Post reported last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is now musing in public as to "whether there was a missed opportunity" for dialogue with Iran before Mamhoud Ahmadinejad's election in 2005. If that's true, than the real danger for the next president may not reside in underestimating Iran's power, but in underestimating its willingness to cut a deal.
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First Posted: 05-19-08 05:49 PM | Updated: 05-27-08 05:12 AM