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Grand Bargain Bandwagon Gaining Steam
During Condoleezza Rice’s May 31 press conference announcing that the US would look favorably on joining the EU3 talks with Iran, Secretary Rice was at pains to point out that
This is not a grand bargain. I want to make very clear we are not talking here about what some have characterized as a grand bargain.
Listening to Rice deliver that line, I was struck by the fact that John Bolton’s remarks not 10 days before sounded an awful lot like a grand bargain:
[I]f [the Iranians] do what Libya did, the same thing will happen. The “regime stay” strategy is following the Libyan example…I’ve probably said a thousand times that the Libya example is there for both North Korea and Iran to see, and that’s all I’ve ever said and this wasn’t any different.
Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program and paid up for the Lockerbie bombing. We then removed them from the state sponsors of terror list and normalized diplomatic relations with the Khaddafi government. If that’s not a grand bargain, what is it?
Now, former NSC senior director Flynt Leverett is on the NYT op-ed page blasting his former employer. Why?
[B]y refusing to consider a “grand bargain” with Iran — that is, resolution of Washington’s concerns about Tehran’s weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism in return for American security guarantees, an end to sanctions and normalization of diplomatic relations — the Bush administration is courting failure in its nuclear diplomacy and paving the way for Russia and China to win the larger strategic contest.
[...]
By continuing to reject a grand bargain with Tehran, the Bush administration has done nothing to increase the chances that Iran will accept meaningful long-term restraints on its nuclear activities. It has also done nothing to ensure that the United States wins the longer-term struggle for Iran. Such a grand bargain is precisely what is required, not only to forestall Iran’s effective nuclearization in the next three to five years, but also to position the United States for continued leadership in the Middle East for the next decade and beyond.
The calls for talks with Iran got so loud that the Bush administration could no longer ignore them. One can only hope that the same thing will happen for those of us who have been calling for a grand bargain. Otherwise, Iran may be able to use the rope-a-dope diplomacy that North Korea has used so effectively, buying the Iranians enough time to present us with a nuclear fait accompli before we can get to the bottom diplomatic line.
There’s a time to cut to the chase, and that time is now. As Ted Carpenter and I wrote in April, a grand bargain
would test the Iranian side’s faith immediately, without endless haranguing over peripheral or esoteric issues. We would determine rather quickly whether negotiations would be worth the breath.
More importantly, with a full-scale deal on the table, the Iranians would have no excuses to back away. If they refused the deal, there would be only one conclusion to draw: Tehran is irreversibly determined to develop nuclear weapons.
We don’t need to panic, but time isn’t on our side here. The worst-case estimate (.pdf) is that Iran could be three years away from a bomb, and the US intelligence consensus says 5-10 years. Still, there’s no need to drag this out indefinitely. We need to put all of our cards on the table and ask Iran what it’s holding.
Stay the (Undefined) Course
The New Republic’s Spencer Ackerman snarks President Bush’s Iraq press conference this morning:
We now have a clear distillation of his Iraq strategy: reducing violence in Iraq to the miraculously calibrated amount that will “enable us to achieve our objectives,” a figure larger than zero violence, since that’s “not going to happen.” It’s a brilliant, sublime concoction of a foreign-policy emulsion, a strategy that requires the sort of precision of measurement befitting the world’s greatest pastry chefs. Add a little too much violence and we “make the world a more dangerous place.” A touch less violence—well, that’s unfair to expect us to accomplish, but “obviously, we would like violence to go down.” Clearly, the only responsible policy in Iraq is to discern, and then achieve, the Magic Number.
Gene Healy and I complained about the empty rhetoric of “stay the course” back in November. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…
Why Do We Spend So Much on Defense?
Reuters alerts us to the new report from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which includes a workup on global military expenditures. A few key findings:
World military expenditure in 2005 presents a real terms increase of 3.4 per cent since 2004, and of 34 per cent over the 10-year period 1996–2005. The USA, responsible for about 80 per cent of the increase in 2005, is the principal determinant of the current world trend, and its military expenditure now accounts for almost half of the world total.
[...]
The USA is responsible for 48 per cent of the world total, distantly followed by the UK, France, Japan and China with 4–5 per cent each.(emphasis mine)
The USA is today unchallenged in our hemisphere, and we enjoy friendly relations with almost all great powers in the world, depending on one’s perspective on where the US-China situation is headed. Fighting terrorism the right way–with bolstered intelligence cooperation, small-scale special forces activities and cooperation with our allies–is actually quite cheap.
But we still spend nearly as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Why? If the threat of terrorism doesn’t justify such massive expenditures, what on Earth are we so afraid of?
There isn’t a good answer. Moreover, even this enormous level of expenditure doesn’t seem to be turning the Bush administration’s ambitious foreign policy aspirations into reality, and the unfortunate mismatch between means and ends is on display daily in Iraq. The thing to do, of course, would be to acknowledge the limits of military power, quickly pull our foreign policy goals into line with our national interests, and stop trying to reshape the culture and politics of faraway peoples that we don’t understand, and who don’t threaten us. Unfortunately, such a correction doesn’t seem to be in the offing.
For a useful and thoughtful critique of US defense spending, see this PA by my former colleague Chuck Pena.
You Heard It Here First
The award for obvious headline of the day goes to this offering from AP:
But in the article, there’s a startling admission from Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution:
“The Iraq example coupled with the North Korea example probably is part of the motivation for some in Iran to get a nuclear weapon,” and do so quickly, said Ken Pollack, research director at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.
Iran absorbed the lessons of those other two nations that President Bush linked as a three-way “axis of evil,” Pollack said.
“We didn’t invade North Korea because they had a nuclear weapon. We did invade Iraq because they didn’t have a nuclear weapon but we thought they were trying to get one. If you’re Iran, what is the logical lesson?”
Of course, you could have gotten this analysis way back in January 2003 from my colleague Ted Carpenter, who wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
In his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush explicitly linked both North Korea and Iran to Iraq in an “axis of evil.”
It would hardly be surprising if Pyongyang and Tehran concluded they would be next on Washington’s hit list unless they could effectively deter an attack. Yet neither country could hope to match the conventional military capabilities of a superpower.
The most reliable deterrent — maybe the only reliable deterrent — is to have nuclear weapons.
In other words, U.S. behavior may have inadvertently created a powerful incentive for nuclear weapons proliferation — the last thing Washington wanted to occur.
Giving Diplomacy a Shot
Lots of whispers around Washington this morning that today’s the day that State will announce that the US is willing to come to the table with the Iranians. And sure enough, at 11:00 this morning, Secretary Rice announced that the United States will join the EU-3 nations (Britain, France, and Germany) in negotiations with Iran, provided that Iran is willing to suspend uranium enrichment.
This is a step in the right direction for the administration. Now, though, it’s important that we keep the talks focused and cut to the chase, preventing the talks from turning into torturous and largely pointless name-calling matches like the Six Party talks in North Korea. Those of us who are advocates of diplomacy will be watching the negotiations closely.
Expect loud bellows of outrage from the few remaining Bush doctrine supporters any time now.
Beinart on Being Wrong
Peter Beinart, among the loudest and most passionately pro-Iraq-war liberals, recently got a generous book deal to write about what Democrats should do about foreign policy. Beinart has since recanted his support for the war, admitting (with a list of excuses) that it was a mistake.
Kevin Drum interviews Beinart about his book at the TNR website (sub. req’d.) and asks this:
KD: The obvious question, then, is with a track record like [yours] why should anyone listen to you now?
PB: Anything one writes deserves to be judged by itself. The Democratic Party nominated someone in 2004 who had been flat wrong in his opposition to the Gulf War in 1991, I think most people would acknowledge that.* Many people who were very prominent figures in the Democratic foreign policy debate and the Democratic Party in general–most of the people who were there at that time in 1991 were wrong about that. The vast majority of the party was wrong, and yet it still seems to me that we have things to learn from people like Sam Nunn or John Kerry. If you were to go from the Gulf War through Kosovo and Iraq, you would find that a large number of people in every facet of the liberal Democratic universe were wrong, on at least one of those wars. Very, very few people were right about all three of them. The people who were–and I think Al Gore is in this category–deserve a significant amount of credit, but the truth of the matter is, if you were looking for an untainted record, you would find very few people. (emphasis added)
Per Beinart, pundits’ predictions deserve to be judged by themselves. So if someone has a consistent record of making wrong predictions and embracing dubious premises in support of a policy that turns out to be a catastrophe, when that person starts issuing declarations about similar issues, we shouldn’t pay any attention to his track record, apparently.
That’s pretty convenient. There were plenty of folks who got Iraq right. Beinart got it wrong, and yet has hardly missed a beat in urging an interventionist foreign policy on his fellow liberals. Something’s a bit odd there.
*(I’d certainly quibble with Beinart’s belief that Gulf War I was a slam dunk success. It put US troops in Saudi Arabia which served as a “principal recruiting device” for Osama bin Laden to rally support against the United States and laid the groundwork for the second war against Iraq. But that’s a separate matter…)
United They Fall…
…at least in popularity, that is. The AP is reporting on the Bush-Blair summit today with the headline “Besieged Bush, Blair to talk about Iraq.” The two leaders have seen their popularity plummet as a result of the Iraq war, with the crowning acknowledgement coming from Karl Rove at AEI recently, where Rove remarked on the president’s record low poll numbers by saying, “People like this president…They’re just sour right now on the war.”
Sour indeed. And as my colleagues Chris Preble and Jonathan Clarke point out in press releases and a podcast here, unless Bush and Blair can conjure a miracle in Iraq, they’re likely going to stay in the cellar, popularity-wise.
My other colleague, electoral guru John Samples, argued here that Bush should have done much better in the ’04 election than he did, and that the culprit was — you guessed it — Iraq.
Misinformation on Iran
Last week, Canada’s National Post ran a revolting and disturbing report that the Iranian majlis had passed a law instituting “separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public.” Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the story was that
Religious minorities… will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their zonnar.
Several news outlets and blogs picked up on the story, and the New York Post ran the original column under the headline “Iran OKs ‘Nazi’ Social Fabric.”
As it turns out, however, the reporting appears to be false.
Our Reckless Diplomacy
Some observers in Washington seem to think that the Bush administration can simultaneously browbeat Russia over its domestic politics and ask for its cooperation on matters like the Iranian nuclear issue. Britain’s Telegraph sheds light on the fact that it may not be that easy:
The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, traded barbs during bad-tempered talks at a foreign ministers’ summit in New York on Iran’s nuclear programme.
[...]
One official in Washington said: “It was a pretty extraordinary session and everyone’s been talking about it in private since. It was certainly quite an introduction to the rough and tumble of the new job for [new British foreign secretary Margaret] Beckett.”
Mr Lavrov arrived at the Waldorf for the meeting seething about a speech on Kremlin policies delivered by Dick Cheney, the vice-president, the previous week in Lithuania. The Russian repeatedly complained about the comments and then threatened to veto a Security Council resolution, drafted by Britain and France and backed by the US, that would force Iran to abandon enrichment of uranium.
Although Moscow has made clear that it opposes any use of mandatory powers, the other ministers were left in no doubt that Mr Lavrov’s approach reflected fury over the Cheney speech. As the mood worsened, Mr Lavrov accused the Americans of seeking to undermine efforts by Britain, France and Germany to solve the crisis.
He singled out Nicholas Burns, the State Department’s number three, for particular flak, complaining about his criticism of Russian involvement in Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant. Already frustrated, Ms Rice, a Russia expert, took exception to his remarks about Mr Burns and curtly told her guest: “This meeting isn’t going anywhere.” The gathering in Ms Rice’s suite had been intended as a 30-minute chat before dinner but turned into a two-hour session. By the time the foreign ministers sat down to eat at 10.30pm, their sea bass was shrivelled and, to Mrs Beckett’s surprise, the bickering continued in front of senior officials.
From the Telegraph’s reporting, Rice may have been blindsided by Cheney’s confrontational rhetoric in Vilnius:
Last week’s developments also underscore tensions between Ms Rice and the men who effectively ran US foreign policy during George W Bush’s first term – Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary. Ms Rice was annoyed that talks on Iran with Mr Lavrov were complicated by the vice president’s remarks but Mr Cheney and other hardliners want to send a tough message to Russia and also oppose US overtures to Iran and North Korea.
This is a reckless, unsophisticated form of diplomacy. Of course it would be better if Russia were more liberal. But that doesn’t change the fact that issuing very public condemnations of the Russian leadership is going to irritate the Russian leadership, making Russian cooperation on other (more important) American foreign policy objectives even more elusive. Right now, we need to put all of our efforts into making a serious attempt at peacefully denuclearizing Iran. Poisoning our relationship with Russia would be, as they like to say at the State Department, “unhelpful.”
But it appears that even the disaster in Iraq has not punctured the belief of some that the US is all-powerful and does not need to prioritize its foreign policy goals at all. If Mr. Cheney and his fellow-travelers continue undermining the (already feeble) US efforts at diplomacy, the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the Iran issue will get worse and worse.
Can We Negotiate with Odious Regimes?
It appears that in the case of Libya, the answer is yes.
After more than twenty years, the US is restoring normal diplomatic relations with the regime of Muammar Khaddafi. Well before the Iraq War, the US government had opened a diplomatic dialogue with Tripoli to work toward dismantling its WMD programs. The two reached an agreement, and have now normalized relations. This notwithstanding the fact that Mr. Khaddafi’s government remains rather ugly and reprehensible in ways too numerous to count.
It’s a lesson we should keep in mind, particularly with respect to certain other US relationships in the news today. We can negotiate with odious regimes.
And sometimes, good can come of it.
Please, Talk to Iran
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush [.pdf] was remarkable, in that it was the first time the leader of Iran has sought to engage the leader of the United States since the Iranian revolution.
Unfortunately, the letter was tainted by the fact that it was sort of loopy, to put it charitably. The Wall Street Journal editorial page compared it – fairly — to the Unabomber’s manifesto. And Mr. Ahmadinejad has a particularly nasty habit of sprinkling Holocaust revisionism and bombastic rhetoric about Israel into every speech he makes.
Unsurprisingly, the Bush administration dismissed the letter, pointing out that it does little to get at the range of substantive issues that divides our two countries. Still, there were some observers who thought that the fact that Ahmadinejad took the step — let alone the fact that he has jetted to Malaysia to declare that Iran “is ready to engage in dialogue with anybody [except Israel]” and that “there are no limits to our dialogue” — represented an opening. But the bizarre tone and lack of substance in the letter sowed grave doubts for some about the prospects for defusing the crisis.
Fortunately, the Iranians appear to have cribbed their strategy from Nikita Khrushchev, sending a second, non-nutty letter to Time magazine for dissemination in the West. In that letter, Hassan Rohani, a representative of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, makes a serious proposal that holds a much better prospect as a starting point for negotiations — and for standing back from the brink of war.
The deal Rohani offers is not very close to the Bush administration’s current demands, but in the course of trying to get to the negotiating table, the opening salvos don’t often resemble the final deals.
We should definitely reply to Mr. Rohani’s letter. Hawks are right to point out that we don’t want to get rope-a-doped here: We don’t want to enter into endless negotiations with the Iranians that go nowhere and just allow them to play for time. That’s why, if we want to find out what their intentions are, we should offer them a serious deal, and see how they respond.
If the Iranians are at all willing to give up their drive toward nuclear weapons in return for normalizing our relationship (including our promising not to attempt “regime change”), it is definitely, absolutely worth making a serious effort to get that deal.
The False Hope of Public Diplomacy
Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a report titled “U.S. Public Diplomacy: State Department Efforts to Engage Muslim Audiences Lack Certain Communication Elements and Face Significant Challenges.” [.pdf]
The report focuses mainly on structural and programmatic aspects of the US public diplomacy effort, but it hints at a central problem. It has become a cliche in Washington to refer to the crisis in public diplomacy, the idea being that we need to get our message out better. America’s unpopularity in the Muslim world, the thinking goes, is the result of poor communication. The trouble with this logic is that it rests on the notion that it is somehow the presentation, not the product itself, that is the problem.
The GAO report points out that, by and large, where Muslim anti-Americanism is concerned, US foreign policy is the culprit:
All of our panelists agreed that U.S. foreign policy is the major root cause behind anti-American sentiments among Muslim populations and that this point needs to be better researched, absorbed, and acted upon by government officials.
This echoes the Defense Science Board’s 2004 report on strategic communication [.pdf], which put the point rather more tersely:
American direct intervention in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies…Muslims do not “hate our freedom,” but rather, they hate our policies.
Granted, US public diplomacy could improve a great deal. But emphasizing public diplomacy as the problem implies that somehow people in the Muslim world just don’t understand our foreign policies. The stark reality is that they understand our policies well enough. They just don’t like them very much.
It’s true enough that foreign policy isn’t a popularity contest, and on the rare occasions when vital American interests are threatened, say, by a pending terror attack, public opinion ought to be low on the list of our concerns. But in too many cases, US foreign policy unnecessarily inflames public opinion in the Muslim world. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, the erstwhile US military presence in Saudi Arabia, US support for tyrannical regimes in the Arab world, and the unrelenting push to maintain a US military presence on Muslim lands, all have greatly increased the potential recruiting pool (let alone sympathy) for groups like al Qaeda.
That’s why the GAO is right to say that the “point needs to be better researched, absorbed, and acted upon by government officials.” Until our foreign policy itself is fixed, all the public diplomacy in the world won’t fix our image problem—or deflate support for al Qaeda—in the Muslim world.
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