The war in Lebanon has brought Iran back to the center of US attention. Indeed, some experts have argued that this was a “proxy war” between Iran and the U.S., with Hezbollah fighting for Teheran and Israel fighting for Washington. Be that as it may, the issue of Iran now requires new thought and action by the United States, if our long-term interests are to be served. These are not simple calculations.
U.S.-Iranian relations have had a curious pattern over the years. Iran went from being a “regional influential” serving American interests to a hostile presence after the 1978-79 Islamic revolution in which the Shah was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini. Since that time, the two countries have had no official contacts, and the U.S. has sought to isolate the Islamic regime as much as possible – in hopes that, over time, it would “mellow” and either become a “normal” government or be overthrown from within. In the process, the United States has done virtually nothing to encourage those in Iran who have wanted it to steer a less hostile course, perhaps even to seek a rapprochement with the U.S. Thus Washington supported Iraq in the 8-year war which Saddam Hussein launched against Iran and, following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which Iran supported U.S. efforts to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, developed a doctrine of the “dual containment” of both Iran and Iraq.
This situation of uneasy non-relations between the United States and Iran entered a new phase following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001. During the U.S. military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran provided a good deal of political support, but this produced no willingness in the U.S. to seek a change in the overall relationship. In the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there was a prevailing view in Washington to prevent the emergence of any regional hegemon, in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere, that could be a challenge to U.S. interests and influence. That view was one of the major reasons for the Iraq War; it has also been an ambition of many officials in Washington to reduce, if not eliminate, any competition from Iran for power and position in the region. This was the basis for a policy of seeking regime change in Teheran, in the hope that a different government would be less hostile, less assertive, and more willing to behave like a “normal” nation – i.e., one inclined to cooperate with the United States.
The contest between the United States and Iran was intensified by Iranian efforts to develop the technology to produce civilian nuclear power. Begun by the Shah, the program advanced steadily under the Islamic regime. By the early part of this decade, however, the United States became increasingly concerned that Iran was, in fact, working to create the capacity to build nuclear weapons, either with plutonium produced as a byproduct of electrical power generation or through the centrifuge enrichment of uranium. Meanwhile, in light of a range of Iranian activities and attitudes that the U.S. found unacceptable, President George W. Bush included Iran in the “axis of evil” he named in his January 2002 State of the Union message.
Following the Iraq War, some officials in Washington considered taking pre-emptive action against Iran, seeing it as at least as great a challenge as Iraq to the U.S. position in the region. That option rapidly came to be seen as infeasible, however, as the post-conflict crisis in Iraq intensified, developing into a full-scale insurgency. The U.S. military was particularly reluctant to take on another major task in view of grave difficulties it was facing in pacifying Iraq. With U.S. relations with several key European countries at near rock-bottom after the invasion of Iraq and with the severe costs that would likely be posed by military action against Iran, the U.S. administration acceded to a European desire to try diplomacy, at least as a first step, as a means for trying to induce Iran to abandon all activities that might lead to nuclear weapons and to provide total transparency for all of its nuclear programs.
Three years of nuclear diplomacy with Iran, conducted by Britain, France, Germany, and the putative “foreign minister” of the European Union, Javier Solana, produced almost nothing, and this lack of progress increased suspicions in Washington that Iran was simply playing for time, in order to get its nuclear programs even more established and, to the extent possible, buried underground where they would be less vulnerable to military action. At the same time, however, the United States chose to ignore feelers from the Iranian government concerning a so-called grand bargain – namely, a trade for Iranian good behavior on nuclear and other issues, including Iran’s ending support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and its opposition to Arab-Israeli peace efforts, in exchange for U.S. security guarantees for Iran – along the lines of guarantees given (at least verbally) to North Korea, which said it had already built a few nuclear weapons. Nor would the United States permit the European states to put on the bargaining table the possibility of security guarantees, which would be meaningless unless the U.S. agreed to them.
Iran played its own negative role. The presidential elections in June 2005 returned to power a surprise victor, the Mayor of Teheran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who soon demonstrated a “no quarter” attitude toward the U.S. and, more directly, Israel, which he said should be “wiped off the pages of history.” This seemed to validate U.S. criticisms and concerns of Iran and also called into question whether someone of this temperament could be relied upon to reach any positive agreement on the nuclear or other issues.
The recent war in Lebanon opened a new phase in the US-Iranian confrontation. There will likely be debate for some time whether Iran instigated Hezbollah’s seizure of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of 8 others on July 12 or whether Hezbollah acted on its own. Nevertheless, it was clear that Iranian-supplied rockets formed the mainstay of Hezbollah’s attacks on Northern Israel, and Iran clearly benefited politically from Israel’s failure to defeat Hezbollah after a month’s conflict, despite the large-scale use of some of the world’s most modern weaponry and wholehearted U.S. support for Israel.
The war also seemed at the time of the August cease-fire to validate two other points: first, that any U.S. military action against Iran would likely pose serious risks and costs in terms of potential attacks by Hezbollah on Israel. Rather then removing that threat and thus at least some of Iran’s ability to deter a U.S. (or Israeli) military attack by showing that its ally, Hezbollah, could retaliate against Israel, Hezbollah’s survival gave greater currency to that possibility in the event of a U.S.-Iranian conflict. Second, however, the course of the war and the way it was represented, in terms of the Iranian role, served to solidify U.S. attitudes of opposition toward Iran, underscored Iran’s obduracy regarding Israel, and made less likely any U.S. compromise with Iran on other issues, including that of the latter’s nuclear programs. Thus war between the two countries might have been made even less likely than it had been before the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, but so too has any reconciliation between the U.S. and Iran – or even amelioration of their confrontation – also become less likely.
This development is not necessarily to America’s benefit. At one level, the U.S. role in the Lebanon war – especially its unwillingness to use its influence to stop the conflict even after it had become clear that Israel could not achieve its goal of disarming Hezbollah – has reduced its political and moral standing in the Middle East even below the historically low levels it had already achieved as a result of its invasion of Iraq and inability to stop the ensuing insurgency and sectarian violence verging on civil war. At another level, while the U.S. is still looked to by virtually all parties in the region as the most important power both regionally and globally, the demands on it to assert its position have been increased, not decreased, by Israel’s failure and Washington’s obvious passivity in trying to bring the conflict to a halt. This increases the burden on the United States to prosecute successfully (with its allies) the effort to extirpate the Taliban in Afghanistan; it also makes imperative that the U.S. take a formidable lead in seeking to lead Israel and Palestine to a final settlement, even though, for Israel, the outcome of the Lebanon war will make it more difficult for any government to make compromises even for a prospect of genuine peace, even in the (unlikely) event one should emerge.
It will also be more difficult, following the Lebanon war and the renewed demonization of Iran, for the U.S. administration to shift gears on the nuclear issue and consider seriously the merits of the possible “grand bargain” mentioned earlier. It thus will find itself back in the middle of a serious dilemma: not willing to reach an accommodation with an Iran that is not feeling any inclination to moderate its rhetoric if not some of its actions; yet facing clear evidence that a military attack on Iran offers little prospect of success either in eliminating its nuclear programs, taming its government, or leading to a downfall of the regime in Teheran. This dilemma is heightened by renewed concerns in most of Europe lest there be yet another conflict in the Middle East.
At the same time, it would not be inferred from Hezbollah’s relative success – that is, it was not destroyed by the Israeli military – that Iran has gained much greater influence in the region, especially among Sunni Arab governments; certainly that Iran has any more chance now than before of becoming the “regional hegemon.” So long as the U.S. continues its military, political, and economic presence in the region, that role belongs to it, and no one in the region has any illusions on that score, even though the U.S. has much to do to translate this situation of power into influence.
This is therefore one of those moments in history where two countries – the United States and Iran – find themselves confronting one another, in part for reasons of history, but with neither having the capacity to defeat the other, in war or in peace – yet lacking the political will and imagination to change fundamentally their relations with one another. Yet both have an opportunity to live in relative tolerance if not harmony with one another; both have a chance to get off the path to unwanted conflict; and both could find some complimentary interests in the future, as they did on occasion in the past. But to achieve such a modus vivendi – or better – will require levels of statesmanship on the part of both countries that neither seems able, at least for now, to attain.
