Planting Lethal Seeds

By Chris Jones

The Iran issue is one likely to get worse before it gets better. As the thugocracy in Tehran plugs away on uranium enrichment efforts while refusing to agree to a fuel swap deal, pressure is rising in Washington and elsewhere to do something and do something fast. Internationally, the U.S. is drafting a new round of UNSC sanctions although there has been no indication from Beijing or Brasilia that it will support such measures. Domestically, there’s strong momentum from both sides of the aisle to pass sanctions that would likely target the petroleum sector. The combination of these will provide a safety valve for some of the rising pressure to take action on Iran but as Douglas Paal quipped in David Ignatius’ article yesterday:

Sanctions always accomplish their principal objective, which is to make those who impose them feel good.

Therein lies part of the problem. As the administration tries to strike the difficult, if not impossible, balance of sanctions that pressures hardliners and the IRCG without harming the general population, there is good reason to question how much sanctions can do in the grand theme of things. That does not mean sanctions should not be pursued, particularly in light of recent Iranian intransigence, if they can be deployed in a relatively “smart” way but they are just one piece of a much larger Iran puzzle. Trita Parsi recently compared Iran to “the 21st century equivalent of 1930s Russia — a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” which makes it “hardly surprising that Washington has had such a difficult time formulating a successful Iran policy” The dual-track strategy of engagement and punishment being pursued by the administration begs a more basic question: what is the end game for our Iran strategy? CSIS Counselor and Trustee Zbigniew Brzezinski provided a spot on response to this question in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last week:

In an interview, Mr. Brzezinski lays out his formula. Try to stop Iran's nuclear program, and make Tehran pay a price if it keeps pursuing it, but don't count too much on sanctions; offer a robust American defense umbrella to protect friends in the region if Iran crosses the nuclear threshold; give rhetorical support to Iran's opposition while accepting America's limited ability to help it; eschew thought of a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities; and keep talking to Tehran.
Above all: Play the long game, because time, demographics and generational change aren't on the side of the current regime.
"This is a country with a growing urban middle class, a country with fairly high access to higher education, a country where women play a great role in the professions," he says. "So it is a country which I think, basically, objectively is capable of moving the way Turkey has moved." That is, it can evolve into a country where Islam and modernity co-exist, even if somewhat uncomfortably.
. . .
Meantime, on changing Iran's character: The U.S. should adopt "a kind of posture of support and endorsement" of the forces inside Iran now openly opposing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mr. Brzezinski says, without deluding itself into thinking it has the ability to propel a regime change.
Crucially, Mr. Brzezinski instead thinks forces at work within Iran will undermine the regime over time, so long as the U.S. and the West don't take actions that actually interfere with that process.
Thus, it's important to craft sanctions in a way that "doesn't stimulate more anti-Westernism, or a fusion of Islamic extremism and nationalism." He'd keep talking to Iran too: "Most major issues internationally that have been resolved by negotiation have involved negotiations over a long period of time."

The problem is that nobody wants to play the waiting game. The Obama administration needs tangible evidence of foreign policy victories, Congress wants a quick solution to the Iran problem, and the pace of nuclear development in Iran is faster than the timeline for a large societal revolution.

An interesting point of comparison for the discussion of human rights is the Soviet Union during the Cold War. President Carter, unlike his predecessors, placed a strong emphasis on human rights. This decision may have been based more on ideology and morality than the strategic value of such a campaign but nonetheless. Robert Gates, writing in his mid-1990’s memoirs before ascending to the Secretary of Defense, provides a fascinating account of the Carter presidency from a national security perspective. Splitting his time between the White House and CIA during the Carter administration, Gates argues that the typical conception of Carter as weak on national security, shown recently by Walter Russell Mead’s article and the response from Carter and Brzezinski, doesn’t give Carter enough credit for what he accomplished. In a chapter entitled “Planting Lethal Seeds,” Gates says the following about Carter’s human rights emphasis:

While Carter’s human rights policies were derided at home as naïve and counterproductive, in later years Soviet dissidents would be virtually unanimous in their praise of those policies and the importance to the democratic dissidents of the publicity those policies brought to their cause. Carter’s actions and policies gave encouragement to the nascent human rights groups that sprang up throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union after the signing of the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. His approach marked a decisive and historic turning point in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Too bad for Carter that the important impact of his policies would only become known years later as dissidents fled the East and those affected by his policies would become leaders as their nations became free.
. . .
Walter Lippman many years ago wrote that we must all “plant trees we will never get to sit under.” The efforts of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to plan and nurture the seeds of change on behalf of human rights in the East, and to challenge the communist governments’ treatment of their own people, in my view, gave new hear, resolve, and courage to those inside the Soviet “prison house of nations,” people would challenge not just governments’ treatment of their citizens but the legitimacy and the very existence of those governments. The fragile seeds of change planted between 1975 and 1978, so scorned and controversial at the time, would bear lethal fruit and help destroy an empire that was more vulnerable than either its own rules or the West understood at the time. (96)

Working from the human rights model provided by Carter, what lessons can be had for the current situation in Iran? To be clear, historical comparisons are often an imprecise direct parallel due to many important differences between, in this case, the late 1970’s Soviet Union and Iran today. That said, much can be learned about the degree of paranoia present within both regimes about the power of dissent. Khamenei’s regime is “irretrievably paranoid,” justifiably so in some ways, about Western influence in Iran in a manner reminiscent of what Gates said about the Soviets:

Carter had, in fact, changed the long-standing rules of the Cold War. Through his human rights policies, he became the first president since Truman to challenge directly the legitimacy of the Soviet government in the eyes of its own people. And the Soviets immediately recognized this for the fundamental challenge it was: they believed he thought to overthrow their system . . . The Soviet leaders knew the implications for them of what Carter was doing, and hated him for it. (95-6)

The trick for the Obama administration is to plant the lethal seeds that can ultimately help bring ruin to the current regime in Iran while retaining plausible deniability, so to speak, about direct Western involvement. As Brzezinski pointed out, the U.S. should adopt a posture of support while at the same time understanding that the U.S. does not have “the ability to propel regime change” or “take actions that actually interfere with the process.” If there is a revolution, it will have to be an Iranian revolution.

One area that could be of great value within these constraints is technology, particularly social networking technology. Two export control lawyers recently penned a piece in Foreign Affairs hailing changes in U.S. policy to ease restrictions on exporting internet technology to Iran but concluded much more needs to be done. Likewise, Iranian opposition activist Shirin Ebadi called for the UN to press Iran on human rights instead of sanctions. Specifically, she cites Western companies such as Nokia-Siemens and Eutelsat that are helping regime censorship activities.

Efforts to expand access to technology efforts make a lot of sense. It is an effort to allow people to access the ability to say or read things as opposed to determining what should be said or read. In the same way that democracy promotion in the Middle East may result in Hamas winning an election, providing access to technology cuts both ways. It can provide a mouthpiece to those opposed to the regime but it can also be another avenue to express discontent with the West. The choice will be up to the Iranians. The U.S. simply facilitates the ability to access the internet, viewed as a fundamental right by 80% of the world, and some of the related technologies and applications. The internet and other forms of technology could be some of the lethal seeds by which the following from the naicINsight blog unfolds:

I agree with the Leveretts’ conclusion that Iran’s government is not about to crumble under the pressure of the protest movement. But I believe now more than ever before that democratic change in Iran is bound to occur eventually. The events of the past seven months have revealed a conflict embedded deep within Iran that will not go away. It might be suppressed for awhile, but it won’t be extinguished. The struggle for rights will continue, and, to paraphrase President Obama on the night of his election, the Iranian people will “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

Change won’t be overnight. It probably won’t be before Iran acquires a nuclear weapon or the capability for one. It won’t be the only part of a multi-faceted strategy to deal with Iran but it may be the most important, even if it takes longer than we want. Taking the long view doesn’t mean there aren’t a number of things the U.S. can and should do in the short-term but it does mean that the fruits of that labor might not be seen for some time.

 //Emiliya 1998 Under a Wikimedia Creative Commons License