Updates

Update from AIJAC

July 15, 2009
Number 07/09 #06

Today’s Update contains three pieces offering advice to Western governments, especially Washington, as they seek to deal with the post-election situation in Iran.

First up is, again, thinktanker and former CIA agent specialising in Iran Reuel Marc Gerecht, who offers his advice in the course of  a long essay reviewing in detail the current situation in Iran. Gerecht says the regime has indeed largely regained control of the streets and is thus probably no longer in imminent danger, but that the overall political situation in Iran is nonetheless very different. He says the regime is indeed more scared and fractured than it has ever been, but that it is a mistake to believe that changes in US policy, or Obama’s charisma, can bridge the “religious and ideological chasm” between Iran’s leaders and the US. Indeed, he suggests that the current unrest, blamed on the US, and with the US as the lodestar for the aspirations of Iranian dissidents, has made the regime even more wary. For Gerecht’s complete argument, CLICK HERE. Gerecht mentions that Iran’s leaders are addicted to conspiratorial views of the world and will see all US efforts in these terms – Amir Taheri describes the bizarre conspiracy being woven by the regime about the supposed US hand behind the unrest. An earlier piece on conspiracy theories and the unrest came from Daniel Pipes.

Next, recent AIJAC visitor to Australia Emanuele Ottolenghi offers some concrete ideas of measures that can be taken to help promote improved human rights in Iran. He has some ideas for diplomatic sanctions and symbolic actions which illustrate disdain for Iranian leaders and support for dissidents which, he argues, will affect Iranians given their emphasis on national honour and pride, and also signal to dissidents that they are not alone. He also suggests a variety of measures that can be undertaken via unofficial civil society to have the same effect. For Ottolenghi’s assortment of concrete ways to help isolate and change the Iranian regime, CLICK HERE. Ottolenghi also had some thoughts on comments about Israel and Iran by US Vice President Biden, discussed below, here. 

Finally, Israeli academic expert Emily Landau of Tel Aviv University discusses US policy toward Iran in the wake of statements by Vice President Biden last week that some interpreted as giving Israel a “green light” to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities (which was strongly denied by the administration). She looks at President Obama’s recent trip to Russia and the discussion of Iran, and says there appears to be a subtle shift toward pressure in the Obama Administration’s approach to Iran. However, she argues that the pressure is currently much too subtle to influence Iran, and that there is little hope that US demonstrations of willingness to be accommodating to Teheran will have any positive effects. For her analysis of what the US Administration must look to do next, CLICK HERE. More on the – fairly limited – Middle East implications of Obama’s Russia visit is offered by the academics associated with Middle East Strategy at Harvard, here and here.

Readers may also be interested in:

• Meanwhile, exploring the Shiite Islamic roots that Iran’s democracy movement can call on is distinguished Iran scholar Abbas Milani.
• Major protests in Iran last week – plus comments on their significance from Iran-watcher and author Michael Ledeen.
• An Iranian general promises his troops are ready to die to suppress the unrest, while a conservative politician warns Iran may face “disintegration.”
• A piece on the connection between Iranian former President Rafsanjani, a major figure today in the opposition, and the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires.
• An opinion piece on Muslim reactions to the Uighur tragedy in China, and an argument illustrating what an Iranian cleric’s reaction says about Iranian complaints about foreign “meddling” in their own country.
• Strategic analyst Max Boot on the status of the latest offensive in Afghanistan. Plus, a review of an interesting new book on the history and future of the Afghanistan war.
• Meanwhile, Afghan women reject the Burka. 

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On Top of a Volcano

The Iranian regime, after the crackdown

by Reuel Marc Gerecht

The Weekly Standard, 07/20/2009, Volume 014, Issue 41

As Ali Fathi, the pseudonymous Iranian journalist for Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, has sadly observed, the most fearful words inside his homeland are now Gom shodeh (“he has disappeared”). In 1999 during student demonstrations against the regime, Fathi himself vanished into the country’s secret prisons. He and some other lucky inmates eventually emerged. Many, like Fathi, left Iran, despairing of their future and remembering the fear and loneliness of being unpersons in the Islamic Republic’s gulag. The regime probably believed until the elections of this past June 12 that it had eliminated the 1990s reform movement that blossomed under the presidency of Mohammed Khatami. Ali Khamenei, the regime’s clerical generalissimo, now knows how difficult it is to suppress an increasingly vibrant democratic ethic that is championed by men who helped make the Islamic revolution.

Iran has not seen so much tumult since 1979. It is an odd twist of fate that, at the very moment when a wide swath of the Iranian people want an end to dictatorship, we have an American president who seeks to make peace with the country’s supreme leader–if Khamenei would only make peace with him. True, every president since Ronald Reagan has been eager to get beyond the Islamic revolution. If Khamenei had ever sent his globe-trotting emissary Ali Larijani to Europe with an offer of a high-level, confidential chat, you can rest assured that George W. Bush would have had Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice on the plane to Geneva. (And he would have been right to do so.) This never happened because Khamenei and others–probably including many of the reformists who are now challenging Khamenei’s rule–really do believe that the United States is “the Great Satan,” “Satan Incarnate,” “Global Arrogance,” and “the Enemy of all Muslims.”

The Obama administration is distressed by what has unfolded in Tehran. The president’s tempered response to the demonstrations gradually approached outrage as Khamenei started crushing the protesters. Unfortunately there is little the United States can do to reinforce Iran’s growing democratic tendencies. But there are things it definitely should not do, and President Barack Obama seems poised to err profoundly and dangerously.

Before discussing strategy and tactics, however, it is necessary to understand why the Islamic republic is irreversibly in transition, and why the internal tension that exploded after June 12 with a force few foresaw won’t go away, despite the crackdown and despite behind-the-scenes efforts by Iran’s two great political clerics–Khamenei and his brother-in-arms-turned foe, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani–to restore stability to the Islamic Republic.

When trying to understand clerical Iran, the first thing Americans need to realize is that this is not simply a Middle Eastern Muslim power that harbors some negotiable grudge against the United States. George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech, like the CIA-backed 1953 coup against Iran’s secular nationalist prime minister, is only a footnote to the religious-ideological aversion that the Islamic Republic’s elite has for America. When Khamenei and Larijani say they can see no difference between President Obama and his predecessors, they are being analytically accurate. For someone who believes in the Islamic revolution–who sees Iran as the vanguard Islamic nation, led by clerics who will keep the country on the divinely revealed “straight path”–abandoning the struggle against Obama’s America would be the ultimate betrayal of God.

Yet President Obama so far does not appear to understand Khamenei and his allies nearly as well as they understand him. For Obama, who has turned his ecumenical autobiography, Dreams from My Father, into foreign policy, religion is not central to identity. As the French Arabist Gilles Kepel astutely noted in Le Monde, the president tried to “Americanize” Islam in his Cairo speech last month, to transform the Middle East’s defining religion into something that could cohabit amicably with the West’s secularized and latitudinarian creeds. Born to a fallen-away Muslim father (a sad turn of events for a faithful Muslim) and a secular mother, Obama joined a Christian church as an adult. In Cairo he promised to stand guard over Islam, to ensure that Westerners do not insult the faith. President Obama’s history- and culture-bending speech was captivating, and for the tiers-mondiste crowd in the Middle East and the West who like their American oratory punctuated with apologies, it was heavenly music. But for Iran’s faithful disciples of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, it had no appeal. Khamenei immediately attacked Obama for his arrogance.

Perhaps Obama will revise his views. He and the rest of us are witnessing the gom shodeh years of Iran’s painful escape from theocracy. During the postelection protests, Khamenei gave shoot-to-kill orders to his security services. At least 20 individuals have so far died. Neither the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s praetorians, nor its more thuggish appendage, the Basij, has shown any sign of siding with the opposition. The regime has not repeated the mistakes of the shah: Where the Pahlavi king had only the imperial army to keep order, Khamenei has numerous security units with their own chains of command. No one seems to know who actually controls the Robocop anti-riot units, which Tehranis often call merrikhiyan (“Martians”). Iranians I’ve spoken to tell of Azeri Turkish-speaking security forces, perhaps from the provinces of Qazvin and Zanjan, being deployed in Persian-speaking areas of Tehran–a time-tested imperial practice, using “foreigners” against the natives.

Iran’s religiously grounded authoritarianism has again driven the country’s angry educated youth from the streets and progressive voices from the press. The bravest of the demonstrators will continue to annoy the security forces, but probably won’t seriously challenge them. Prominent dissidents and hitherto loyal members of the establishment are being forced to confess their conspiracies and errors of judgment. Most of Iran’s most senior ayatollahs, who have never shown any affection for Khamenei, have not actively thrown their support to Mir-Hussein Mousavi, the runner-up in the rigged elections and the de facto leader of the opposition.

Prime minister during the war with Iraq (1980-88), Mousavi continues to reject the balloting, and has strongly implied that the whole structure of dictatorial government with Khamenei’s office at the pinnacle–not just the election results–is illegitimate. The odds are good that Khamenei, who has so far refrained from damning Mousavi by name, will make him pay dearly for the assault on the regime. Mousavi’s lack of charisma–he makes John Glenn seem an inspiring speaker–has hurt any effort to develop a coherent opposition movement. Mousavi never had his own electoral organization–he just borrowed personnel and tactics from former president Mohammed Khatami, who during his eight years in office (1997-2005) also failed to develop an organization to match his ambitions. Khatami, like Mousavi, has shown some guts in opposing Khamenei (in Khatami’s case, it’s a notable change from his past meekness in front of the supreme leader). But whether the former prime minister, who probably didn’t expect to win the presidential elections and was as shocked as everyone else by the magnitude and passion of the demonstrations after June 12, has the fortitude to continue his stand given the regime’s fondness for targeting family members of dissidents is open to question.

The regime has regained control of the streets. Barring the unexpected (security forces shoot dead someone in one of Tehran’s vast, impoverished neighborhoods, provoking a riot), Mousavi surely knows that Khamenei has, for now, decisively outflanked him. Hope for reform again appears a long-term affair: Where once Iranians–especially the highly Westernized ones who are the sources for most Western journalists and academics–could believe in the possibility of perceptible, progressive change, they now see little prospect of peaceful evolution.

In America, some within the administration are already insisting the June 12 election doesn’t fundamentally change America’s national-security interests vis-à-vis the Islamic republic. And recent events are unlikely to change the timeline for the clerical regime to manufacture a nuclear weapon. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen’s recent conjecture that Tehran would have the bomb in one to three years still seems reasonable.

Iranians, however, may be closer to the end of the gom shodeh period than they are to its beginning. The clerical establishment is probably irretrievably fractured. We can already see Iranians referring to the aftermath of the elections as a fitna, an Arabic word that sends tremors through any faithful Muslim. Best translated as “schism,” it recalls the violent convulsions that began with the death of the third caliph in 656 and continued for five years until the death of Ali, the fourth caliph and the spiritual father of Shiite Islam. It connotes a blood feud, if not a civil war, among the faithful, a spiritual upheaval that can put the community into a moral free fall. Fitna is not necessarily a bad thing for Shiites, whose faith is in great part defined by rebellions and martyrs. But fitna is always traumatic, touching the believer’s most elemental identity. The Western media have tended to depict the struggle in Iran as pitting the young against the old, the more secular against the more religious, the affluent against the poor, and the countryside against the city. But those dichotomies don’t adequately capture either the tense politico-religious competition or the source of friction least tied to religion, the mistrust between the better educated and the poorly educated.

The clergy too are divided. On one side are those who support Khamenei and, more important, the authoritarian idea of hukumat-e adl-e islami (“a government of Islamic justice”). On the other side are those who are convinced that Khamenei and the dictatorial clerical system are harmful to the clergy as an institution, which ultimately depends on the respect and faith of the people. These mullahs, like the layman Mousavi, want to see established a hukumat-e jumhuri-e islami (“Islamic republican government”).

Among the latter are those jurists who increasingly find the rule of one cleric–one rather mediocre cleric–over all others to be intolerably offensive. Iran’s mullahs do not shout this out: The Special Clerical Court that prosecutes and jails refractory members of the brotherhood has often been a busy place. But the views of dissident and unhappy mullahs become known, even in the clergy’s cloistered, deeply fraternal world. Where Khamenei’s allies are either explicitly hostile to the idea of democracy or believe it needs to be closely monitored by Islamic jurists, the opposing side is more open to the idea of representative government, if nonetheless nervous about how untutored laymen, especially those of little faith, may vote.

The influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s preeminent cleric and probably the most respected Shiite jurist in the world, comes into play here. Iranian clerics have been free to go to Iraq on pilgrimage and for study since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and some Iranian clerics in Iraq will tell you flatly that what they admire most about Sistani is that so many Iraqi Shiites voluntarily follow his advice.

Sistani, an Iranian by birth who still speaks Arabic with a Persian accent, has embraced democracy in Iraq even though he and many of his fellow clerics in the holy city of Najaf are no doubt worried about where democracy, with its potential for moral relativism, will eventually carry their flock. There is not a single cleric in Iran who can command the allegiance–or street power–of Sistani. Skeptics of Sistani will tell you that the grand ayatollah is being coopted by access to Iranian state funds (and he has undoubtedly received money from Tehran). Given Sistani’s preeminent position in Iraq, and how much he’s been able to do with how little (in 2003 he humbled American viceroy L. Paul Bremer and George W. Bush with little cash in the till), it’s doubtful this is a serious worry. What’s interesting is the reverse: the potential appeal in Iran of the Iraqi model–the cultural and religious authority that comes from the Shiite tradition of keeping a certain distance from power, combined with a modern, moral embrace of democracy.

Although Iran’s clerics have increasingly become wards of the state, they do not view themselves as bureaucrats. The old adage about mullahs–that all they do is talk, have sex, and eat–may well be true of most. The clerics behind Khamenei, like those behind Mousavi–and like their lay counterparts on both sides–may be what a wise and deeply jaded Iranian informant, who has spent much of his life in the company of clerics, bemoaned: “Just a bunch of corrupt bastards.” (His emphasis was not on their pecuniary inclinations.) Iranians who have spent a great deal of time with clerics often see only their earthy qualities.

But clerics think they are more than the sum of their mundane parts. They really do see themselves as the representatives of the “Imam of all Time” (the Mahdi), the custodians of a holy trust. When Ayatollah Mohammed Yazdi, a truly hard-line member of the election-monitoring Guardian Council and the head of the Teachers’ Association of the Qom Seminary, recently gave a strong defense of clerical supremacy in politics by stressing the clergy’s connection to the Mahdi, he wasn’t joking. His defense of Khamenei’s credentials for supreme leadership strained credulity, but that he saw himself and Khamenei as part of a bulwark against disbelief is beyond question. Yazdi’s statement, which emphasized Muslims’ obligation to submit to God’s will–that is, Khamenei’s rule–seemed especially bald because the threat to the status quo, on the streets of Tehran and probably within the classrooms of Qom, was real.

As much as Yazdi might not like it, the mullahs’ image of themselves is still intimately connected to how their peers perceive them, how many students they can attract, and how many average faithful Iranians recognize them as authorities worthy of emulation. Iran’s mullahs are not blind: They are well aware that those among them who’ve become identified with Khamenei are not (with a couple of interesting exceptions) the religious authorities most admired. Traditional clerics, whom Khamenei riles with his pretension to know God’s will and the national interest, are slowly but surely aligning themselves with Qom’s constitutional and democratic traditions, which began to germinate during the 1905 revolution against a despotic shah.

The educational and generational divide may be the most telling in defining Mousavi and Ahmadinejad supporters, and it is working in favor of the progressives. Clerics’ children are as well educated as any group in the country. As the Franco-Iranian sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar revealed in his book Avoir vingt ans au pays des ayatollahs (“To Be Twenty in the Land of the Ayatollahs”), Qom’s youth have been rapidly modernizing since 1979. Clerics under 40 just might be one of Mousavi’s biggest fan clubs. Against all of this, Khamenei has wealth and power, the timidity and corruption of many mullahs, and the clerical fear of change that was once an asset of the shah’s against Khomeini. This tug-of-war can’t go away.

It is possible that former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his circle of friends, family, acolytes, and parasites will provide another shock to the system. This would be odd, since Rafsanjani belongs to neither the “Islamic justice” nor the “Islamic republican” tradition, although his sympathies and personal interests align more closely with the latter. With the possible exception of Khamenei, who does not appear to be personally corrupt, Rafsanjani is the richest man in Iran. He is all by himself a third force within the clerical establishment. Where he and Khamenei were once revolutionary brothers, they have become increasingly bitter antagonists.

Khamenei’s preeminence has probably driven Rafsanjani nuts (before the revolution Rafsanjani was the better trained, and he is certainly the cleverer, man). In the early post-Khomeini years, when Khamenei was frequently rebuffed by Qom’s clerical establishment, he and Rafsanjani shared power more generously. Although not without friction, they were a team. But Khamenei’s power has grown massively in the last decade, with shadow ministries usurping the authority of the official government. Rafsanjani’s lair, the Expediency Council, which is supposed to solve disputes between parliament and the legislation-approving, all-cleric Guardian Council, tightly allied to Khamenei, has become less important as Khamenei’s power has grown. Add to this the constant and serious threat of President Ahmadinejad, who has a neuralgic distaste for Rafsanjani and his corrupt clan, and it’s not hard to see why Rafsanjani went on the warpath against Khamenei, who has a spiritual brother in Ahmadinejad.

Yet there is no man in Iran who would more quickly cut a deal with Khamenei if he thought it were in his interest to do so. And the reverse is probably true: Khamenei would bite the bullet if he thought Rafsanjani had outplayed him, by aligning enough clerical backing and dividing the Revolutionary Guard Corps, to make the theo-retical possibility of his removal from office seem a bit more concrete. (The Assembly of Experts, which Rafsanjani is on but does not dominate, has the power to remove Khamenei from office.)

Both Khamenei and Rafsanjani believe in and live for the Islamic Republic and neither wants it damaged. So the possibility of compromise is certainly there. Yet the current collision may be too personal for anything beyond fleeting compromises between the two men. I asked my cleric-associating informant from Tehran what he thought Rafsanjani would do, and he quickly answered: kherabkari (“sabotage”). He’ll go at Khamenei inside the system, and he won’t stop.

Revolutions tend to devour their own children, and Iran’s has already consumed thousands. But even at its bloodiest moments, it pulled back from the savagery of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Iran’s ruling elite doesn’t like to spill the blood of its own. The Islamic republic’s complex, traditional wiring–who owes loyalty to whom and who is married to whom–checks the brutality of the system. Iran’s badly battered traditional culture, with its aversion to violence against women, can still constrain those who claim to defend Islamic values. It’s a very good bet that few within President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hard-line circle shed a tear about the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the beautiful, Westernized young woman gunned down and immortalized on the Internet. Yet the regime backpedaled rapidly on her death. Moral outrage within Iran, and abroad, had an effect.

As much as some within the Revolutionary Guard Corps might like to try, the regime just can’t do what the Assad family in Syria does so well: slaughter. The regime will continue to use discreet and hidden violence–secret prisons, night raids, intimidation of the families of dissidents, and extreme coercion, even assassination, of opposition leaders who have charisma, know too much, or have too many friends. The disappearance last week of Saeed Hajjarian, a former ministry of intelligence chieftain who helped mastermind Khatami’s rise and Mousavi’s presidential campaign, is a signal to the revolutionary elite. In 2000, Hajjarian was shot in the head and disabled, quite possibly by one of his former comrades.

The regime is scared, perhaps as much as it was during the darkest days of the Iran-Iraq war in 1987-88. The so-far successful crackdown will rebuild some of the regime’s confidence. But only some. The illusion of broad popular support for Khamenei is gone. The lay and clerical revolutionary elites are split, and even if they can make up in the short term, the atmosphere within will probably remain a lot like that in the mafia after the FBI started successfully planting moles and bugs. Everyone will be waiting for the match that will reignite June 2009.

Which brings us to the United States. It could be an interesting time for Iranian operations in the Central Intelligence Agency. Disillusioned believers in the Iranian revolution may start volunteering information and their own services inside Iran to the clandestine service. “Walk-ins” could be a telling gauge of how despondent and angry Iranians are with their overlords. If the quality of U.S. intelligence on Iran improves over the next 12 months, we are probably seeing the fissures of June 2009 deepen.

But intelligence collection isn’t policy. Leaving aside the ethics of President Obama’s outreach to Khamenei and his allies, it’s a dangerous course of action. Once, Senator Obama may have believed that the power of his biography, his sincerity, his anti-Bush charm, and a lot of commercial goodies could persuade the clerical regime to relent in its quest for nuclear weapons and give his administration the kind of triumph the Bush administration gained in Libya against Muammar Qaddafi’s nuclear program. But it’s increasingly difficult to believe that President Obama really thinks he can stop Tehran’s quest for a bomb with diplomacy and sanctions. One gets vibrations from the administration that the game is changing–that the policy of engagement is for after Ali Khamenei gets his nuke.

If this is so, the supreme leader will not reciprocate the kindness. He will just view it as weakness: The Islamic republic bested the United States, and the president has come groveling. Obama’s diligent attempt not to meddle in Iran during the demonstrations earned him and America no kudos. The Iranian opposition still got accused of being in league with foreign devils. And this isn’t throw-away rhetoric. Conspiracy-mongering is rampant throughout the Middle East; it is cancerous among the Iranian clergy. No matter how hard the president tries to be nice, his words and actions will be seen as machinations.

If President Obama intends to do nothing serious to discourage Tehran from obtaining the bomb, then he needs to try to scare it with a militarily front-loaded containment strategy. To discourage Iran from sending its agents and terrorist surrogates to meddle abroad under cover of a nuclear umbrella, the United States and its allies must pressure the regime constantly, with tough rhetoric, a never-ending discussion of the need for greater democracy in the country, and a firm public commitment to counter any hint of Iranian terrorism with military strikes. This could keep the regime off balance and guessing about President Obama’s willingness to use force.

The administration should try to admit, at least to itself, that America–not Europe, which has officially practiced engagement since 1992–is the lodestar of so many Iranian dreams. Contrary to what Obama suggested throughout his campaign, America’s hostile foreign policy under both Democratic and Republican presidents did not diminish the United States’ standing among the Iranian people. As the clerical regime has faltered, as the democratic forces within the country have gained ground on the theocracy, America’s position has improved. It’s no accident that so many trailblazing Iranian revolutionary theoreticians who have fallen from the “straight path” are now living in the United States.

All of this goes against President Obama’s soft-power nature and the current within the Democratic party which holds that the world’s problems, especially in the Middle East, stem in part from America’s aggressiveness. Yet Ali Khamenei has surely shown the president that America’s problems with the clerical regime have nothing whatsoever to do with George W. Bush. President Obama is looking at a religious and ideological chasm that he cannot, no matter what he does, cross.

Understandably, the United States has been fixated on al Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Iraq. We have all wanted to believe that the age of state-sponsored anti-American terrorism is over. Now, however, with Iran boiling, its leaders increasingly angry at us for their truant flock, state-sponsored Iranian terrorism could hit us with gale force.

The president would be well served to read again The 9/11 Commission Report about Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah’s contact with al Qaeda (see pp. 240-241). This outreach probably started under President Clinton. September 11 and George W. Bush’s bellicosity made Khamenei pull back from Sunni jihadists. It’s a very good bet that the supreme leader, Ahmadinejad, and Rafsanjani, who has always been a fan of outreach to Sunni militants, are already hunting for foreign partners who hate the United States as much as they do. (There is a reason beyond uranium exports why Tehran loves Hugo Chávez.) Once they are backed by nuclear weapons, it’s hard to see what the leaders of the Islamic republic would fear from an American president who avoids the word jihad when describing 9/11 for fear of offending Muslim sensitivities.

Reuel Marc Gerecht, a WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Targeting Human Rights Abuse in Iran: A Postelection Strategy

By Emanuele Ottolenghi

PolicyWatch #1550, July 14, 2009

On July 8, G8 summit participants issued a statement expressing “serious concern” about the Iranian government’s postelection actions; U.S. president Barack Obama characterized the situation as “appalling.” Further, both Obama and French president Nicolas Sarkozy emphasized that Tehran will face serious consequences if Iran has not begun to cooperate on its nuclear program by September. The United States and Europe, meanwhile, should focus on the regime’s latest human rights abuses, signaling to Iranian dissidents that they are not alone and that current or future sanctions are not intended to punish them for a regime that they neither elected nor support. Sanctions are a statement to Iran’s leadership that failure to compromise on outstanding issues — particularly the nuclear program — could erode the regime’s shaky internal legitimacy.

Measures That Governments Can Take

Governments must demonstrate to Iran’s repressive leaders that although dialogue may continue, “business as usual” will not. It is critical that Iranian dissidents know they are not alone in their struggle.

Iran, where national honor and pride are highly valued, will not be indifferent to regular displays of public contempt for its leaders. The regime replaced its ambassador to Rome, for example, immediately after the latter’s failure to secure any meetings between Italian officials and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad during the 2008 Food and Agriculture Organization Summit, which Italy hosted. The regime’s loss of face as a result of such events should not be underestimated or dismissed as “gesture politics.”

When visits to Western countries by top Iranian officials are unavoidable — such as the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York — cities themselves can take high-profile actions, such as paying tribute to prominent Iranian dissidents by renaming sections of streets in front of Iranian embassies, consulates, or interest sections. (During the Reagan administration, the city of Washington, D.C., designated the block of 16th Street in front of the Soviet embassy as “Andrei Sakharov Way” in honor of the jailed dissident.) Similarly, local media campaigns can give a human face to the suffering in Iran.

Here are some other examples of effective actions that governments can take in support of Iranian human rights:

• Western governments should severely limit the number and scope of visits by Iranian dignitaries. The red carpet should stay rolled up, and high-level meetings should be the exception rather than the rule. Accompanying business delegations should be denied visas.

• The United States and EU should coordinate travel bans and bank account freezes of Iranian officials, much as they did for Serbian officials guilty of human rights abuses. These steps would augment the existing restrictions mandated by UN Security Council Resolutions 1737, 1747, and 1803 against Iranians involved in nuclear or missile programs.

• Governments should make every effort to close international offices and bureaus used by the Iranian regime to promote its agenda. As such, particular scrutiny should be given to Press TV, the Iranian government’s London-based English-language satellite channel.

If Iranian human rights abuses intensify, additional measures are worth contemplating:

• Declare the principal figures responsible for Iran’s internal repression personae non gratae. Deny them visas or transit rights for nonofficial travel in Western countries.

• Reduce high-level official interaction, and suspend ministry-level visits to Iran by EU and other Western leaders. Parliamentary delegations from Western democracies would defer their frequent visits to Iran until human rights conditions improve, while invitations issued to Iranian parliamentarians are shelved — or at the very least conditioned upon strong actions taken by the Iranian government on human rights issues. In response to particularly egregious Iranian provocation, Western countries with representation in Iran could recall their top diplomats.

• Raise the issue of human rights as the first agenda item at any bilateral meeting, ideally in a joint statement that details specific abuses and requests for action. Western diplomats, for instance, should arm themselves with the specifics of unjust arrests or censured publications, rather than relying on generic demands for more political and press freedoms. Diplomats should also point out to their Iranian counterparts that failure to act on these issues by a given date will provoke a response, such as condemnatory statements at international meetings or the suspension of planned trips.

Beyond Statecraft

Supporting human rights activism in Iran is a mandate that should extend beyond official initiatives. The involvement of a country’s citizenry through civil-society organizations communicates to Iranian dissidents that the world is aware of their plight and is ready to take concrete action. Nongovernmental organizations and other associations could initiate, sponsor, or promote:

Person-to-person outreach. Professional societies (e.g., media, medical) should engage in dialogue with their Iranian counterparts in a joint effort to improve human rights in Iran.

Expressions of support. National unions and international federations of unions should support labor rights in Iran by embracing the plight of individual Iranian dissident union members. International women’s rights groups should celebrate the leading role that Iranian women have played in the recent postelection protests and garner support for Iranian women’s movements such as the “One Million Signatures” campaign.

Organization of conferences and workshops. High-profile international assemblies can do more to raise public awareness of Iran’s human rights record, such as the regime’s brutal suppression of homosexuals.

Media campaigns in support of individual dissidents. Feature stories and op-eds can also highlight human rights abuses against minority groups such as the active persecution of Iran’s Bahais.

These kinds of nongovernmental initiatives would engage Western civil society as a whole in the struggle for Iranian human rights and would expand the Western arsenal of pressure considerably.

Conclusion

Despite recent events, engaging Iran may still be a worthwhile policy goal. Engagement gives the United States time to convince potential allies that all venues for compromise have been sufficiently tried. It affords the regime an opportunity to change its behavior. It communicates to Iran that the West is ready to engage the regime before it inflicts economic pain on the people, and, perhaps most important, it places the burden of failure squarely on the regime. Nevertheless, governments exercising diplomatic engagement should not be tempted to pretend that all is well in Tehran: pretense has no place in the face of repression.

Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi is the director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute and the author of Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb (Profile Books, 2009).

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Red Light, Green Light: Establishing US Levers of Pressure on Iran

Emily B. Landau

INSS Insight No. 119, July 13, 2009.

Statements made by US President Obama and Vice President Biden in the first week of July regarding the US position on Iran elevated in particular the issue of whether a green light had been provided to Israel for an attack on Iran. The immediate question of a possible green light was raised by Biden when he said in an interview from Iraq that the US cannot dictate to another country what they can and cannot do when they determine that they are existentially threatened. The issue was then put to rest when Obama absolutely denied that this meant the US was giving Israel a green light to attack. According to Obama, Biden had merely stated a “categorical fact”: that the US cannot dictate to other states what their security interests are.

The importance of the green light issue is not whether an Israeli attack is one step closer – in fact Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has signaled that he will go along with Obama’s engagement approach until the end of the year – but rather what it means in terms of the broader message the US is trying to convey to Iran. There are indications that the Obama administration is attempting to fine-tune its strategy on Iran, and quietly put in place different levers for pressuring Iran if no diplomatic movement is in sight. When the “green light” remarks are assessed within the context of other high-level statements and developments over the past 10 days, this trend becomes even more apparent.
Obama’s current dilemma is that while he has made it clear that he remains committed to negotiations, Iran has still not responded to the US offer. Moreover, Ahmadinejad has promised to take an even more determined stance against the West in response to their recent “meddling” in Iran’s internal affairs, even though Obama took every possible precaution in order not to be perceived as interfering in this way.
So what to do when your hand remains outstretched and nobody takes it? How to introduce pressure without seeming to undermine a firm commitment to negotiations? The set of subtle and admittedly somewhat confusing messages that have recently been issued most likely reflect the Administration’s attempt to do just that. And the surprising remarks on Israel are perhaps not as surprising when viewed in this context.
In the first set of statements – on the eve of Obama’s trip to Russia – both the President and Biden clarified in separate interviews firm US intent to seek engagement and diplomacy with Iran, regardless of the post-election dynamics in that country. It is noteworthy that when Vice President Biden added his remarks on Israel, he was very clear about distancing the US from any Israeli decision to attack. And when President Obama related to Biden’s statements the next day from Russia, he continued this line. He referred to US inability to dictate to others, but also his own clear decision to pursue engagement. So the idea that an attack could take place was planted, and then firm US commitment to engagement and diplomacy – even after the election and its brutal aftermath – was underscored. Pressure was given another subtle boost, however, when Obama clarified in the continuation of his remarks that, “as commander in chief”, he reserves the right “to take whatever actions are necessary to protect the United States”.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen contributed to this dynamic on July 7th in a speech delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington DC upon his return from the summit in Russia, where he accompanied President Obama. Mullen stated that the US should conduct dialogue with Iran with all options on the table, including the military option. He stressed that the window for dialogue is a narrow one, and that the scenario of a nuclear Iran could spur a nuclear arms race that no one can afford. He again asserted that an attack on Iran would also be a destabilizing development, but expressed understanding of Israel’s calculation of an existential threat. He noted that this was an important part of the overall equation which underscores why it is so important for diplomacy to succeed.

During his visit to Russia, Obama worked on putting additional levers of pressure in place: improving US-Russian relations, but not relenting on the issue of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic – an issue which is still under review in the new US administration. Without creating outward tension, Obama successfully resisted Russia’s attempt to link the missile defense question to Russia’s willingness to proceed on renegotiating START. Moreover, he reiterated his own linkage between missile defense and the emerging Iranian nuclear threat. After months of relative quiet in this regard, Obama used this occasion to emphasize that if Iran was no longer a proliferation concern, there would be no need for missile defense. The initial agreement reached with Russia on the guidelines for continued arms control negotiations is thus an important message to Iran: improved US-Russian relations which minimize Iran’s ability to play the “divide and rule” game, including apparent Russian acquiescence to continue arms control discussions without this being contingent on the US discontinuing its plans for missile defense, which has been a sore point in US-Russian relations over the past few years.

Finally, there are signs that the sanctions option – the traditional lever of pressure in cases of nuclear proliferation – is being revisited. Obama is still struggling not to be perceived as supporting pressure in a way that might undermine his intention to engage, and according to media reports, he was reluctant to have the G-8 meeting decide on immediate sanctions on Iran for this reason. However, the meeting did result in setting a jointly agreed-upon late September deadline for assessing progress on negotiations with Iran. Secretary of State Clinton added her own comments on the need for stricter sanctions on Iran to change the behavior of the regime. This is a much firmer message with a clearer deadline – previously Obama had only vaguely conveyed his intention to review the situation on Iran at the end of the year.

While these indications that levers of pressure are being put in place are a positive development, the subtle approach has its limits, and Iran will no doubt need to see a stronger message coming from the international community. Obama’s attempts to straddle both absolute commitment to engagement and increased pressure on Iran will get more and more difficult to pull off. At some point soon he will have to simply state that without pressure, Iran is unlikely to be serious about negotiations.

It should be highly indicative that even when Obama took steps to address Iran’s sensitivities, in order not to be perceived as interfering in its internal affairs, he was accused of doing just that. The lesson is that Iran’s attitude toward the US is driven by what Iran seeks to achieve, and not perceptions of US accommodation. In fact, accommodation can be interpreted as a weakness to be exploited. To succeed on the Iranian nuclear issue, the US will ultimately have to embrace its own interests and follow through with determination.