The unquestioned assumption of U.S. policy towards Iran has been that there is no downside to military threats. "No option can be taken off the table," says the Bush Administration. "No option can be taken off the table," echo the leading Democratic presidential candidates. "No option can be taken off the table," echoed the conservative Democrats and AIPAC allies in the House who insisted that a provision be removed from the supplemental that would have underscored that President Bush cannot attack Iran without Congressional approval.
This implicitly assumes that threatening Iran militarily has no downside. It might work, it might not work, but there is no harm in doing so.
But this is not so, says the Los Angeles Times. "U.S. strategy on Iran may have backfired," the Times reports.
"Months of hard-nosed U.S. political and military pressure on Iran may have further radicalized and emboldened the regime, undermining Washington's stated aim of neutralizing the Iranian threat without resorting to war, analysts say."
No doubt Bush Administration officials and their Congressional supporters have been over-optimistic about what they could achieve with their policy of confrontation, and underestimated the costs of such a policy. It may also be true that a bellicose Iranian response to a bellicose U.S. policy, while it would be considered a failure by most of the world, would not necessarily be considered a failure by the extreme hawk wing of the Administration, who may perceive Iranian counter-escalation as useful for justifying further escalation by the United States. But as the Times notes, it certainly is a failure as measured by "Washington's stated aims."
The regime has blamed a fear of U.S. airstrikes for its decision to stop disclosing non-required information about its nuclear program, according to a series of memos described by the Associated Press.
Note that, while Iran may have multiple motivations for curtailing cooperation with the IAEA - to retaliate against the UN, or indeed to conceal aspects of its nuclear program - the stated reason is perfectly plausible. In 1999, Barton Gellman reported in the Washington Post that "US intelligence services infiltrated agents and espionage equipment for three years into UN arms control teams in Iraq to eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N. agency that it used to disguise its work." If you think that the U.S. is preparing air strikes against you, and you think that UN inspectors might be supplying information to the U.S. that would be useful to them in targeting those air strikes, you too might want to curtail the access of those UN inspectors.
Ranking U.S. officials for months insisted that "no option was off the table" as far as possible military action against Iran. The Pentagon flooded the gulf with U.S. military hardware and leaked word of a policy to "kill or capture" suspected Iranian agents stirring up trouble in Iraq. As a result, many Iranian officials are convinced that the U.S. remains committed to "regime change" and plans to bomb Iran.
Which means that they are convinced that in the long run there is no point in negotiating with the United States. If you are an Iranian official, and you are convinced that U.S. officials are committed to removing you from the scene, then perhaps you can have temporary agreements, but there is no point to try to permanently resolve any issue, because you believe that the U.S. has a fundamentally different objective.
Ordinary residents say they fear a U.S. attack is imminent and that they are powerless to prevent it. "Will the Americans attack?" is the question on the lips of every Iranian who meets a foreign reporter.
So, the Bush Administration has succeeded in convincing the Iranian public that there is a serious danger that the United States will attack. Are we better off as a result? Not if you regard the continued Iranian detention of the British marines as a bad thing. Not if you regard Iranian failure to cooperate with international efforts to bring stability to Iraq as a bad thing.
The other approach would be straightforward: to publicly commit that we are going to act in conformance with international law, which prohibits a military attack on Iran, not to mention the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits an attack on Iran without Congressional authorization, and which gives treaties to which the U.S. is signatory the force of U.S. law. If the U.S. confines itself to legal means for dealing with Iran - and confines itself to the stated objectives of U.S. policy - it actually has a strong hand. The stated objectives of U.S. policy - stabilizing Iraq, preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, enabling a negotiated agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, resolving the political crisis in Lebanon - are shared by the permanent members of the UN Security Council, the European Union, and the Arab League. The U.S. has many diplomatic tools at its disposal for pursuing these objectives. The threat of military conflict with Iran is not one of them. The track record indicates the opposite: the threat of force is undermining diplomacy.
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