I understand that the Administration wants to let the chaos in Iran play itself out without committing to a position that might be rendered hollow by events. I understand and agree with its continued insistence on pursuing a policy of negotiation that’s in America’s interest. I understand that this head-on collision between interests and values is not at all easy to navigate. But “realism” should no more be an ideological fetish under Obama than “freedom” was under Bush. There was, for example, nothing realistic in an unnamed Administration official’s claim over the weekend that stealing an election and putting down a revolt in blood would cause Ahmadinejad to “feel that because of public pressure, he wants to reduce Iran’s isolation. That might also cause engagement to proceed more swiftly.” The exact opposite is true, as the Iranian President gleefully told a press conference on Saturday. The hard-liners are in the saddle, and so far they’ve shown no interest whatsoever in Dennis Ross’s overtures—perhaps because, as Laura Secor (my wife and main authority on all things Iranian) wrote two months ago, talking to America cuts out the heart of their claim to be the revolution’s heirs and the Islamic Republic’s only legitimate rulers. Journalist George Packer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Togo.
George Packer writes: Realism and Iran
Realism and Iran
from Interesting Times by George Packer
The brutal apparent fraud taking place in Iran puts the Obama Administration, and anyone who cares about both American security and human rights, in an extremely difficult position. For eight years, George W. Bush maintained that there was no tension, let alone contradiction, between “our interests and our values.” The result of this simplistic thinking was to turn American foreign policy into a sustained exercise in hypocrisy and double standards: we declared ourselves the world’s guarantor of freedom, while ignoring or explaining away Mubarak’s repression in Egypt, the Central Asian dictatorships that gave us basing rights, and our own misdeeds and misbegotten policies in the war on terror. We told struggling democrats across the globe that we were on their side, raising their hopes only to disappoint them, while refusing on principle to take the necessary steps toward negotiating with odious regimes like Ahmadinejad’s in Tehran. Bush’s soaring second Inaugural in defense of freedom everywhere turned out to be an exercise in moral narcissism: it made the Administration sound righteous while doing precious little to advance rights. By the time Bush left office, we had the worst of all outcomes: a policy that paralyzed American diplomacy, crippled the pursuit of our own interests, offered a token support for human rights only where we saw fit, and earned the world’s cynicism and scorn.
Obama inherited this self-defeating mess and has quickly moved to clean it up: the Cairo speech, the balancing rhetoric on Israel and Palestine, and the initiative toward Iran. His secretary of state downplayed human rights in Burma, pointing out that a more strident approach had failed utterly to change the regime’s behavior. The new President understood that the U.S. could no longer take a high-handed approach: the world had long since stopped listening, and the language of freedom and democracy had been so deeply tainted that the cleansing will take years. That’s why the passages in the Cairo speech on human rights and women’s rights came after extremism, after Israel and Palestine, after nuclear weapons, and had a careful tone. There’s too much wreckage to sort through before an American President can tell other countries to live up to a standard set by us.
The key phrase in Obama’s remarks on the world stage is “mutual respect and mutual interests.” National interest is the north star of foreign-policy realists, and the turn in rhetoric has aligned Obama far more with George Bush the father than the son. Again, this was a necessary correction. It was folly to refuse to talk to enemies in Tehran and Damascus when doing so would have at least put our interests on the table, and failing to allowed Iran to move full-speed ahead with its nuclear program. The new Administration is grown-up enough to grasp that interests and values are often at odds, and it made sense to say, in effect: interests now, human rights later. Until this past weekend.
Iran’s electoral fraud, and the violent crackdown that immediately followed, have drawn such a muted response from Washington that you can almost hear the backstage anxiety and confusion. The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said: “There’s no reason to think the regime is not in control.” Hillary Clinton went slightly farther: “We, like the rest of the world, are waiting and watching to see what the Iranian people decide. We obviously hope the outcome reflects the genuine will and desire of the Iranian people.” Yesterday, on “Meet the Press”, Vice-President Biden took the strongest position yet: “It sure looks like the way they’re suppressing speech, the way they’re suppressing crowds, the way in which people are being treated, that there’s some real doubt.” Coming from Biden, who doesn’t mince words, this is pretty tame stuff. At this point, the European Union is well ahead of the United States in its stance on the events in Iran.
I understand that the Administration wants to let the chaos in Iran play itself out without committing to a position that might be rendered hollow by events. I understand and agree with its continued insistence on pursuing a policy of negotiation that’s in America’s interest. I understand that this head-on collision between interests and values is not at all easy to navigate. But “realism” should no more be an ideological fetish under Obama than “freedom” was under Bush. There was, for example, nothing realistic in an unnamed Administration official’s claim over the weekend that stealing an election and putting down a revolt in blood would cause Ahmadinejad to “feel that because of public pressure, he wants to reduce Iran’s isolation. That might also cause engagement to proceed more swiftly.” The exact opposite is true, as the Iranian President gleefully told a press conference on Saturday. The hard-liners are in the saddle, and so far they’ve shown no interest whatsoever in Dennis Ross’s overtures—perhaps because, as Laura Secor (my wife and main authority on all things Iranian) wrote two months ago, talking to America cuts out the heart of their claim to be the revolution’s heirs and the Islamic Republic’s only legitimate rulers.
In much of the punditry calling for dialogue with Iran, there’s been a strange naivete about the true nature of the regime—a confusion between the sophistication and tolerance of the Iranian people, and their rulers, who have always taken the most brutal measures to hold onto power. Some advocates of negotiation seem to think that the resistance and stupidity have all been on our side—that if only America showed a little respect for Iran, called it by its rightful name of “Islamic Republic,” stopped talking about carrots and sticks (which Iranians associate with donkeys), then Iran’s rulers would be glad to start talking. It turns out that they have more to fear from talk than we do—in fact, at the moment it’s hard to know exactly what they have to gain by it and a lot easier to see what they have to lose. Perhaps they have a keener sense of their own interests than American commentators, so obsessed with America’s own behavior, imagined.
With riot police and armed militiamen beating and, in a few reported cases, killing unarmed demonstrators in the streets of Iran’s cities, for the Obama Administration to continue parsing equivocal phrases serves no purpose other than to make it look feckless. Part of realism is showing that you have a clear grasp of reality—that you know the difference between decency and barbarism when both are on display for the whole world to see. A stronger American stand—taken, as much as possible, in concert with European countries and through multilateral organizations—would do more to improve America’s negotiating position than weaken it. Acknowledging the compelling voices of the desperate young Iranians who, after all, only want their votes counted, would not deep-six the possibility of American-Iranian talks. Ahmadinejad and his partners in the clerical-military establishment will talk to us exactly when and if they think it’s in their interest. Right now, they don’t appear to. And the tens of millions of Iranians who voted for change and are the long-term future of that country will always remember what America said and did when they put their lives on the line for their values.
