IRAN'S hardliners have gotten the confrontation they desired from the United States. During recent weeks, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has defiantly maintained his nation's right to enrich uranium for a civilian nuclear program in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The United States now finds itself in an excruciating situation with no good options for coercing Iran to give up its weapons. We should avoid sanctions while keeping military force on the table only as a last resort. Eventually, we will probably have to come to terms with some form of a nuclear program in Iran; the best we can do is to ensure that the program is monitored internationally and used for civilian purposes.
It is important to first recognize how massively President Bush has mishandled the situation with Iran. Iran's President before Ahmadinejad, Mohammed Khatami, was a reformer who advocated greater democracy and an expanded rule of law within Iran. He sought closer ties with the West, including the United States, and urged a "dialogue among civilizations" as an alternative to the hard-line policies proliferating among fundamentalist movements across the Middle East. Khatami's advocacy of reform required no small amount of courage in the political atmosphere prevailing in the Middle East, and Khatami repeatedly clashed with Iran's ultra-conservative clerical elite, who retain control over the judiciary and the armed forces. Still, Khatami maintained that Iran had a right to exist as a religious society.
Insensitive to the needs of the reformist movement within Iran and convinced that the clerical elite within Iran still harbored aggressive ambitions towards the United States, President Bush provocatively included Iran as part of his "axis of evil" in his famous speech, along with North Korea and Iraq. Iranians unsurprisingly felt threatened, and the response within Iran was depressingly predictable. In the 2005 presidential election, the electorate shunned Khatami's reformist legacy and elected to office the only candidate who publicly spoke out against future ties with the United States, Ahmadinejad. With Ahmadinejad, Iran's clerical elite gained effective control over all aspects of Iran's government and was able to push successfully for a civilian nuclear program. Ahmadinejad's defiance has enhanced his popularity and nationalist credentials.
Now, the United States has two options to force Iran's hand if, as appears likely, Iran refuses to give up its nuclear program through negotiations. Both would have disastrous implications. The first are sanctions. U.S.-Iranian trade is already restricted by current U.S. sanctions, but the United States is considering tightening existing sanctions and initiating sanctions on a multilateral basis. Sanctions have had a mixed record across the globe. They of course result in a huge humanitarian toll, as sanctions effectively starve the citizens of a given nation. Sanctions imposed would also cause long-term resentment towards the United States And would send the message that the United States does not care about the people of Iran. Sanctions also tend to prop up struggling regimes by allowing popular anger to focus not on domestic leaders but on external "enemies."
Sanctions also often take decades to succeed, in the few cases where they have succeeded at all: Libya, South Africa, etc. Often they do not succeed and only result in humanitarian catastrophe, as in Iraq. And nations, once they have developed nuclear programs, almost never give them up. Over the past half-century, many nations have developed nuclear weapons, and only one, South African, has ever given it up, that only after a dramatic domestic upheaval. Moreover, it is not entirely clear whether Iran has the intention or the capability to develop nuclear weapons in the near term, nor has Iran ended all cooperation with the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Almost any program, in short, would be better than sanctions at this date.
The prospect of war is only slightly less terrible than the prospect of sanctions. Targeted air strikes might delay Iran's nuclear program, and war would provide a more certain end to Iran's present regime. Nonetheless, war with Iran would be an indescribably awful prospect. Iran is a much larger country than Iraq with a more sophisticated army and more mountainous terrain. War with Iran would mean massive troop losses, and the United States would entail the costs of a prolonged reconstruction. The Iran War, which the Pentagon has been planning for since May 2003, would be an even bigger international nightmare than the Iraq War.
What should we do, then? The best thing we can do is enter into diplomatic negotiations at this point. Building good will with Iran, in the form of closer diplomatic and economic ties, was the best option we had in past years and since no political change appears to be forthcoming within Iran, it is our best option today. Given the high costs of war, we may simply have to tolerate an Iran with a functioning civilian nuclear program. The United States has recently given sanction to a civilian nuclear program with India despite only limited guarantees that India's program is intended for peaceful purposes. At some point, we may need to tolerate Iran's nuclear ambitions so long as Iran's program is monitored by the international community and is not intended for offensive purposes.
Noah Peters' column usually appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at npeters@cavalierdaily.com.
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