Elizabeth Spiro Clark is a retired Foreign Service officer who writes extensively on issues of global democratization.
Two factors have altered the politics of the Bush administration’s confrontation with Iran: the North Korean nuclear test and the deteriorating situation in Iraq.
On the surface, it seems the nuclear test should have strengthened the case for a military attack on Iran. After all, the Bush administration could argue that it might be too late to stop the North Koreans from developing the bomb but not too late to preempt Iranian nuclear development. However, at his October 11 press conference President Bush repeatedly embraced multilateral diplomacy—tough diplomacy, of course.
Bush said Americans he talked to asked him why he did not just take North Korea out militarily. He put the talk of a military option in terms of having a rhetoric that underlined the consistency in his goals. Bush seemed relieved and happy that other players, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia, were now agreeing with the U.S. on the necessity of sanctioning North Korea. On Iran, too, Bush could find himself in the embrace of the tough multilateral negotiations strategy—might it be time to coin the acronym TMNS?—and may have to, as in North Korea, further transform the military option into a symbol of consistency.
Bush also made the point last week that North Korea is not Iraq. The administration tried diplomacy in Iraq and failed, he insisted. According to the president, the administration is still trying negotiations with North Korea. Leaving aside the logical and factual gaps in that formulation, Bush has left himself an opening with his comment that North Korea and Iraq were “different cases” to change course in Iran. Bush can back off regime change as a goal in Iran to give himself “time” for negotiations, and a dodge for not preempting in Iran what the administration says is intolerable in North Korea.
Until now, the prescription for all the “axis of evil” states was the same: regime change; now, “cases are different.” The North Korea test is forcing an intellectual awakening in the White House—that going it alone has its drawbacks. This will lead to a new appreciation for nuance in administration calculations.
Ever since the Bush administration requested and got $75 million from Congress last February to aid the Iranian democratic opposition—echoing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998—the policy has been to increase pressure on Iran. A whole series of statements and actions mimicked the lead-up to the war in Iraq, most notably taking the Iranian case to the Security Council where our sanctions demands were certain to fail to get support, leaving the way open for breaking off negotiations and setting up a “coalition of the willing”—a coalition of one this time—to take military action. Even the Administration’s “compromise” to agree to join EU negotiations with Iran was classic unilateralism; the U.S. leaving conditions in place it knew would not be accepted by the Iranians or our allies, refusing to drop regime change as a goal or to discuss Iran’s security concerns. More recently, the case for a march to war with Iran has been fed by reports that the Air Force does not share the negative attitude of the other services for military action against Iran.
The second big change is in the situation in Iraq. The president repeatedly said that he would “finish the job” in Iraq, although “tactics” could change. He echoed his March 21 press conference statement that it would be up to his successor to make decisions on withdrawing from Iraq. However, when Bush spoke in March, the situation in Iraq had not deteriorated to its present point. Signposts to collapse are now everywhere. On her recent trip to Baghdad, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had to be helicoptered into the Green Zone because the road to the airport was not safe. (What war does helicoptering into—and out of—embassies recall?)
Rice moved on from Baghdad to visit Irbil in Kurdistan. Kurdistan, with the best military forces in Iraq guaranteeing its borders, is all but independent from Iraq already. Irbil is building an airport that will take the largest aircraft in the world. Is the administration signaling that the current policy of securing Baghdad may not last forever? The current negotiations between the Iraqi government and tribal chiefs in Anbar province could be read as a lead-in to claiming we are “finishing the job” there, standing up an antiterrorist government in a province that has been described as the heart of both foreign terrorist infiltration and the insurgency. These could be among the “adjustments of tactics” designed to cover up the fact that Iraq is collapsing—fast.
In his press conference, Bush made much of the “huge stakes in the Middle East;” if we don’t “win” there they will attack America “here.” That is a mantra that could be used to justify expanding military operations to Iran. Bush may even conceivably believe that America would face a serious threat that Iran would use its nuclear bombs against the U.S. if it should develop them.
Maybe, though, if Bush can be beguiled into tough multilateralism he can discover and embrace the concept of “containment.” A strategy that combines containment, deterrence and negotiated settlements is already, in fact, taking shape within the administration, according to reporting by Guy Dinmore in the October 13 Financial Times. John Hillan, assistant secretary of state for political and military affairs, is said to be pushing military assistance to the Gulf states to beef up their cooperation as a counter to a nuclear Iran. The same report quotes Cliff Kupchan of the Eurasia Group consultancy as actively looking for an alternative to the “binary choice” of living with a nuclear Iran or staging military strikes. If the realities of the U.S. constraints in Iraq and the epiphany that multilateralism may have its advantages in situations like North Korea, perhaps the Bush administration can be coaxed off the ledge with Iran.
