The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat (23 page)

Our current policy will eventually turn Iran into a failed state. An Iran sliding into the failed-state column will make the nuclear problem worse, not better, and pose a new set of security challenges to the region and the United States.

The other more immediate result of our current policy is to amplify the talk of war. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu argued that further diplomacy was a waste of time, and that Iran’s nuclear program would have to be stopped before it entered the “zone of immunity,” meaning before most of the centrifuges moved under the mountain at Fordo. Israel takes Iran’s nuclear threat seriously, but by harping on Iran’s imminent threat, Netanyahu did a good job of jamming Obama into a corner—committing America to going to war to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons. He would continue this tactic throughout the summer and fall of 2012 to get Obama to commit to a clear red line with Iran.

The administration, too, did its part by trumpeting Israel’s readiness to attack Iran. Every administration official who visited Israel came back saying Israel was ready to send its bombers on missions over Iran. The administration hoped this would scare Iranians into surrendering at the negotiations table—a good cop/bad cop diplomatic strategy. But in practice
it made talk of war ubiquitous. It became commonplace for those on the inside and those reporting on the administration’s thinking to see war around the corner, and the more hawkish voices in particular went further, suggesting it would be a clinical and effective step. The worstcase scenario for what Iran going nuclear would mean—Armageddon in the Middle East—was paired with the rosiest assessment of the effectiveness of an air campaign and its aftermath. “Iranians will not react, cannot react, and if they do it will be limited” was the argument. “They will cower into their hole, and then, weakened and subdued, with the program set back years, they will be a lesser threat.”

The only ones who saw through the flimsiness of these arguments were the military. They knew war when they saw it. They knew it would not be easy or straightforward, predictable or cost free. One three-star army general told a private gathering of senior foreign policy hands, “The enemy gets to vote. You can’t predict how Iran would react. In fact, they have every incentive to react. Not doing so will damage their standing at home and in the region, and surely they will not want America to get comfortable managing Iran as it did Saddam’s Iraq. A war with Iran will be bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan combined. We should expect 15,000 American dead.” The American military had learned the same lesson McGeorge Bundy had—there were some things Iran would never give up.

Many in the center and on the Left looked at the hash of Bush and Obama’s policy and concluded it was time for the United States to accept the inevitable, that Iran would go nuclear, and that it would not in fact be Armageddon. America had dealt with such a threat before, and a combination of containment and deterrence would keep the Iranian threat at bay as it once had with threats from Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong-il.
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Iranians are unlikely to precipitate a nuclear war from which they have little to gain and everything to lose, nor give their nuclear material to terrorists—that is a worry we have with Pakistan, after all, and it has not led us to go to war there. And as for the argument that Iran’s nuclear capability would lead to a nuclear frenzy in the region, that is a talking point with scant historical proof to back it up. After all, North Korea’s nuclear bomb did not prompt Japan and South Korea to build nuclear bombs of their own. Nor did Bangladesh and Sri Lanka go nuclear to keep up with India and Pakistan. America has plenty of experience in
managing exactly the kind of threat that a nuclear Iran would pose, and a far less impressive record bringing wars in the Middle East to successful conclusions.

However, while Iran crossing the nuclear threshold may fall short of Armageddon, it is nonetheless a failure for the United States, which has consistently said that this is unacceptable. If the dual-track policy collapses into either war or containment, it will be a defeat for Obama. Obama made the dual-track policy his own, fine-tuned it and gave it many more teeth, and then moved Bush’s red line back from no enrichment to no nuclear weapon, and still that red line may be breached. On balance, the dual-track policy only gave Iran a reason to dig in deeper and clutch its nuclear ambitions tighter. The policy made Iran not less but more dangerous. It put America in the position of either contemplating war or losing face by letting Iran go nuclear. It would have been better to have seriously engaged Iran, slowed its march to nuclear capability earlier, and not risked war or a loss of face so late in the game.

The larger issue is that our policy will make Iran into a bigger threat than it is today. The result will be not to deny Iran nuclear capability but to create a North Korea smack in the middle of the Middle East. Sanctions will cause isolation, social and economic breakdown, and an increasingly hard-line regime protected by a nuclear shield. And if Iran turns into a failed state under the pressure of sanctions, a vast territory with no one in charge, a fragmented society and broken economy, it will become a monumental headache—a font of drugs and terror right in the middle of a strategically vital region.

The problem with North Korea is not that it is a nuclear state—its many conventional weapons alone and the proximity of so many of them to Seoul already make it highly dangerous—but that it is a dysfunctional and failing state, militaristic and radical, in a vital area of the world. Tightening the noose around Iran’s neck is not changing its mind on going nuclear (it may in fact be convincing it to stick with its nuclear plan), but it is strengthening the hand of the Revolutionary Guards and other hard-liners. For some time now, the Obama administration has lamented the security forces’ growing control over decision making in Tehran. But that is the consequence of saber rattling. Talk of war does not empower moderates and reformers.

Iran’s economy is too big for the Revolutionary Guards to control by themselves. But a shrinking Iranian economy can become one that the Guards can control in toto. The private sector is being hit hardest by sanctions, leaving the Guards room to expand their reach and get their hands on the burgeoning black market that sanctions have created. How ironic if sanctions turn out to bolster the wealth and power of the Revolutionary Guards.

As noted above, sanctions have already begun driving Iranian manufacturing concerns to set up shop in China. There they use Iranian credit held in yuan to run their Chinese operations with Chinese labor. The final products are then exported back to Iran through Armenia, Dubai, Pakistan, Turkey, and especially Iraq. Businessmen and their partners in ruling circles continue to make money while jobs are disappearing in a country already struggling under massive unemployment. Unemployment spiked in 2011, which was also a record year for labor strikes and protests by disgruntled government workers.

The sanctions have not hurt the ruling elites or the well-to-do, but average Iranians are suffering, and Iran’s social fabric is being torn. It is a singular failure of imagination and absence of strategic vision to pursue a policy the end result of which is to replicate the North Korean debacle in the Middle East, or to produce another Iraq.

In the coming decade, America is going to have its hands full dealing with the myriad problems that follow in the wake of the Arab Spring: wars, revolutions, failing economies, and rising Islamist extremism. The last thing we need is a radicalized, failing, and nuclear-armed Iran.

The weakening of Iran will open the Middle East to a surge of Sunni radicalism—combined with greater Chinese and Russian involvement—that will in the long run prove a far larger and knottier strategic problem for America than Iran currently poses or is ever likely to pose. Iran is clearly not an ally in our attempts to manage this tumultuous region, but it could play the role of a natural balancer to the forecast of Sunni extremism. We should not forget the value of balance-of-power politics. For this reason alone, we will likely look back at our Iran policy over the course of the past four years as a strategic blunder.

On December 12, 2011, Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, met with President Obama at the White House. It was an important meeting. Iraq was no longer in the headlines, but a lot was still riding on what happened there. During the election campaign Obama had promised to end the war that George W. Bush had started, and now, on the eve of the next presidential campaign, Obama was ready to close the book on Iraq, announcing an end to U.S. military operations there and bringing home the rest of the troops (although many would be heading to Afghanistan).

During the meeting, Maliki told Obama he had evidence that his vice president, the prominent Sunni political leader Tariq al-Hashemi, and other key members of his Iraqi National Movement (known as al-Iraqiyya) were guilty of supporting terrorism. This was a serious accusation; if true, it meant that Iraq’s fragile unity government was a farce and about to unravel. Maliki wanted to gauge Obama’s reaction, to see whether America would prevent him from attacking Hashemi and his party, a move that was sure to scuttle the semblance of sectarian peace that America had brokered in 2007. Iraq would be stepping close to the edge of the precipice right when America was leaving.

Obama was in no mood to get sucked back into Iraq’s problems. He told Maliki what he wanted to hear: the issue was an internal Iraqi affair. Maliki interpreted Obama’s insouciance as a green light to go after Hashemi without worrying about consequences from America. Once the meeting was over Maliki told his entourage, “See! The Americans don’t care.”

Three days later, on December 15, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta
brought a formal end to the American military presence in Iraq at a ceremony in a fortified compound at Baghdad International Airport. That night, after the pomp was done and Panetta had flown out, Iraqi tanks surrounded the homes of Hashemi and two other Iraqiyya leaders in the government. On paper, the charge was terrorism, but in reality Maliki was exacting revenge. He was angry at Iraqiyya because it had garnered more votes and seats in the March 2010 elections than had Maliki’s coalition. Maliki also believed (though this was not part of the charge sheet) that Iraqiyya was now in the pay of Saudi Arabia, working to undo the government.

To avoid arrest, Hashemi fled to Iraq’s Kurdish region. Iraqi politics then plunged into crisis. Sunni provinces demanded greater autonomy from Baghdad. Al-Qaeda went on the offensive, killing hundreds in scores of bombing attacks in a campaign of terror that went on for months. Iraq was inching its way back to mayhem. This was not the denouement to a tragic war that Obama was looking for. The Americans’ exit was not supposed to tear open old wounds and reignite the conflict. But that is exactly what events portended.

And that is not all. Iraq’s slide into chaos, violence, and internecine conflict put its very existence as a nation in doubt. The process of disintegration that started in 2006 was poised to move to completion. America’s troop surge in 2007 managed to slow its pace and perhaps even halt it for a time, but mistake after mistake in 2010 and then a hasty exit in 2011 removed all that was holding Iraq’s demons at bay—the demons we had unleashed in 2003.

The Obama administration told Americans that our departure from Iraq showed that we were leaving behind a country strong enough to stand on its own feet. But what Iraqis and the rest of the Middle East understood was that we were leaving Iraq, like Afghanistan, to its own fate. We had broken Iraq, and for a while we cared to put it back together; now we did not care. Obama’s shrug when Maliki told him about Hashemi meant that it was no longer America’s responsibility to keep Iraq whole; we were going to let the Band-Aids holding its broken pieces together come off.

Iraq is important, and not just because it is an ancient, oil-rich country sitting in the heart of the Middle East. Post-Saddam Iraq matters
because it is a signature American project whose outcome will be the measure of our reliability and the legacy of our power in the Middle East. For the better part of two decades we have tangled with Iraq, first beating back its regional ambitions, then squeezing away its power, and finally breaking it. We told the region and the world that we knew what we were doing: Iraq and the Middle East would be better off for our intervention. We would build a shining city on the hill, an example of democracy and prosperity that would help transform the whole region. Iraq would show that American power was still a force for good in the world, and would convince naysayers that we should use it more often to ensure global security and spread freedom and prosperity. What the promise of globalization had not achieved, American military muscle could: we would bulldoze the holdouts against the new world order created in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Iraq turned out badly. American power failed the dream. As Iraq shattered into violence, placing the rest of the Middle East dangerously close to a vortex of instability and sectarian conflict, the region lost trust in American power—that we knew how to exercise it, and that when we did we could salvage some good from it. And worse yet, the region learned that we had neither the patience nor perseverance to see through what we started. The speedy American troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was a confirmation of all this. Americans may celebrate that there are no more of our soldiers fighting in Iraq, but this is an end that offers no closure. It will take a lot to repair the damage the war did; the distrust sown by our withdrawal will only add to the tally.