How to Avoid War
Nixon went to China. Now Bush must break out of the box on Iran
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Sept. 20, 2006 - America is in the middle of a giant mess in the Muslim world, and there is one country—just one—that holds the key to solving the whole problem. There is only one country that has the ability, and the interests, to help us confront the out-of-control Shiite militia movement in Iraq, the terrifying Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan and the still-dangerous Hizbullah presence in Lebanon all at once. There is just one country that stands between the unsettling situation we're in now and the far greater horror of a nuclearized Islamic world in which Israel is permanently locked into an existential battle with both Arabs and Iranians, and Americans must live in fear forever. There is just one country that, if it were brought into the community of nations, could stop this downward spiral before it is too late—indeed reverse it.
That country is Iran. The only man who can bring Iran around is George W. Bush. And the only way he can achieve that is by wiping the table clean and proposing a grand bargain with Tehran that discards the silly, artificial constraints in the current U.S. approach. I mean this business of talking but not talking (let the Europeans do it) and artificially separating issues, as in: "We'll have one fellow talk to you about Iraq, but not about nukes; we'll have another fellow talk to you about nukes, but not about Iraq. And we won't talk about anything else."
There is ample precedent for the kind of bold, transformational step that I'm talking about. Good Republican cloth-coat precedent. Richard Nixon, who came of age as a commie-baiting ideologue, proved a great enough statesman in the end to transcend his ideology, to the shock of the entire world, when he realized that the United States and the Soviet Union were locked into hopeless, and dangerous, confrontation. "Red" China was as much anathema to Nixon then as clerical Iran is to Bush today. But Nixon realized that, in that era of American weakness and distractedness, only Beijing could give America the geostrategic advantage it needed to shatter the more dangerous Soviet stalemate. As early as October 1967, he began talking about China in much the same way worried internationalists now speak of Iran: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors," Nixon wrote in Foreign Affairs. As Henry Kissinger later concluded in his magisterial book "Diplomacy": "Excluding a country of the magnitude of China from America's diplomatic options meant that America was operating internationally with one hand tied behind its back."
The United States currently has two hands tied internationally. We have an official policy of not engaging with the one country that could most make a difference in setting Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan on a better course. Similarly, we do not talk to another country that could also help resolve the first two problems: Syria. At the same time, we are utterly bogged down next door in Iraq, as Nixon was in Vietnam. In a moment of clarity, CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid admitted Tuesday that more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq would likely have to remain there at least until the spring of 2007. That means that for the remainder of Bush's presidency, our Army will be completely distracted, our deterrent undermined, our weakness apparent. In Afghanistan the newly confident Taliban are carving out a new Islamist safe haven that, years hence, could set the stage for another 9/11, perhaps a far more devastating one. Even more ominous is the fear that Iran, having successfully divided Russia and China from the West and more recently sown discord between Washington and Europe, will continue to move ahead stealthily to a bomb. A nuclear-armed Iran would turbocharge a Mideast arms race and put the region into permanent hair-trigger Armageddon alert on multiple levels: between Arabs and Persians, between Persians and Westerners, between Israelis and Persians and between Israelis and Arabs.
There is only one conceivable way, at this point, to stop an Iranian bomb. And that is to remove the rationale behind an Iranian bomb. Only Washington can achieve this, because after invading Iraq and threatening confrontation with Tehran, a hostile United States is now the main reason Iranian hard-liners are winning the day in that battened-down and isolated country. Why are the Europeans leading the talks when Tehran knows they represent no threat (or a minimal one of holding up the sale of some dual-use valves and pipes)? Despite the considerable skill of European Union Foreign Minister Javier Solana, these talks are likely to go nowhere.
And what of those crazy clerics in Iran? Won't they get the wrong idea if Bush turns diplomatic softie? We know, of course, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a man of "dangerous" mindset, as Time magazine put it this week. And of course we must try to operate from a position of as much strength as we can muster, which means actively considering muscular last-resort options that could include "forced" inspections of Iran's nuclear sites, or heaven forbid, airstrikes.
But was not Mao Zedong a dangerous man, too? (In fact, he made Ahmadinejad look like a prankster by comparison.) And wasn't Beijing feeling quite confident at the time of the China opening, in 1972, after watching America get bogged down for 10 years next door in Vietnam? Like China, Iran is a country with a long view of its interests. And it is feeling more vulnerable than you might expect right now. The latest postmortems from Lebanon indicate that Hizbullah, Tehran's principal proxy army, was severely hurt by Israeli airstrikes. Iran, if it were encouraged, has considerable interest in containing the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance, its bitter ideological enemy (thanks to the Shia-Sunni split) and in preventing the civil war in Iraq that is now mainly being fomented by Shiite death squads. And Ahmadinejad's scurrilous rhetoric aside, the Iranians do not especially want to antagonize Israel either (one reason why, for 10 years before the inexperienced Ahmadinejad came to power, it was officially sanctioned policy in Tehran to tone down its anti-Zionist diatribes).
Does Iran want the bomb? Almost certainly. But there is ample ground between there and here, many middle stages where Tehran could be persuaded to pause indefinitely if it decided that the threat from the West (read: Washington) had subsided enough to do so. Bush went to war in Iraq hoping to bring the Shiites over to America's side, tilting the balance of power in Islam away from both the Sunni autocrats and the Sunni radicals. Now we are in the peculiar situation of embracing one set of Shiites (led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki) and treating another as if they were lepers. It won't wash in the Muslim world. Nor in the real world. Bush doesn't need to "go" physically to Tehran of course, as Nixon did to China. But perhaps he and the Iranians could meet somewhere else—maybe Reykjavik?
As Kissinger wrote, Nixon was a Wilsonian by inclination like almost all U.S. presidents, Democrat and Republican—in other words, a believer in the concept that it is America's destiny to spread freedom around the globe (no, today's neocons didn't invent that; they only invented pre-emptive war, which is over with, as are they). But Nixon also knew that he had to operate with limited tools of leverage. As Kissinger wrote 10 years ago of that era, which increasingly resembles the one we're in now as Iraq looks more like Vietnam and our country remains split by bitter partisanship and burdened by debt: "The America of the late 1960s—stalemated in Indochina and torn by domestic conflict—required a more complex and nuanced definition of its international enterprise."
Bush once famously said that he doesn't "do nuance." No doubt he will resist taking this step to the last. He has a phobia about appearing weak, and he seems utterly locked into the view that strong leadership means never saying you're sorry or changing course. What his savvier advisers must make him understand—and there is no one who knows this better than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a thorough pragmatist—is that he has no choice at this point.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Sept. 20, 2006 - America is in the middle of a giant mess in the Muslim world, and there is one country—just one—that holds the key to solving the whole problem. There is only one country that has the ability, and the interests, to help us confront the out-of-control Shiite militia movement in Iraq, the terrifying Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan and the still-dangerous Hizbullah presence in Lebanon all at once. There is just one country that stands between the unsettling situation we're in now and the far greater horror of a nuclearized Islamic world in which Israel is permanently locked into an existential battle with both Arabs and Iranians, and Americans must live in fear forever. There is just one country that, if it were brought into the community of nations, could stop this downward spiral before it is too late—indeed reverse it.
That country is Iran. The only man who can bring Iran around is George W. Bush. And the only way he can achieve that is by wiping the table clean and proposing a grand bargain with Tehran that discards the silly, artificial constraints in the current U.S. approach. I mean this business of talking but not talking (let the Europeans do it) and artificially separating issues, as in: "We'll have one fellow talk to you about Iraq, but not about nukes; we'll have another fellow talk to you about nukes, but not about Iraq. And we won't talk about anything else."
There is ample precedent for the kind of bold, transformational step that I'm talking about. Good Republican cloth-coat precedent. Richard Nixon, who came of age as a commie-baiting ideologue, proved a great enough statesman in the end to transcend his ideology, to the shock of the entire world, when he realized that the United States and the Soviet Union were locked into hopeless, and dangerous, confrontation. "Red" China was as much anathema to Nixon then as clerical Iran is to Bush today. But Nixon realized that, in that era of American weakness and distractedness, only Beijing could give America the geostrategic advantage it needed to shatter the more dangerous Soviet stalemate. As early as October 1967, he began talking about China in much the same way worried internationalists now speak of Iran: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors," Nixon wrote in Foreign Affairs. As Henry Kissinger later concluded in his magisterial book "Diplomacy": "Excluding a country of the magnitude of China from America's diplomatic options meant that America was operating internationally with one hand tied behind its back."
The United States currently has two hands tied internationally. We have an official policy of not engaging with the one country that could most make a difference in setting Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan on a better course. Similarly, we do not talk to another country that could also help resolve the first two problems: Syria. At the same time, we are utterly bogged down next door in Iraq, as Nixon was in Vietnam. In a moment of clarity, CENTCOM commander Gen. John Abizaid admitted Tuesday that more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq would likely have to remain there at least until the spring of 2007. That means that for the remainder of Bush's presidency, our Army will be completely distracted, our deterrent undermined, our weakness apparent. In Afghanistan the newly confident Taliban are carving out a new Islamist safe haven that, years hence, could set the stage for another 9/11, perhaps a far more devastating one. Even more ominous is the fear that Iran, having successfully divided Russia and China from the West and more recently sown discord between Washington and Europe, will continue to move ahead stealthily to a bomb. A nuclear-armed Iran would turbocharge a Mideast arms race and put the region into permanent hair-trigger Armageddon alert on multiple levels: between Arabs and Persians, between Persians and Westerners, between Israelis and Persians and between Israelis and Arabs.
There is only one conceivable way, at this point, to stop an Iranian bomb. And that is to remove the rationale behind an Iranian bomb. Only Washington can achieve this, because after invading Iraq and threatening confrontation with Tehran, a hostile United States is now the main reason Iranian hard-liners are winning the day in that battened-down and isolated country. Why are the Europeans leading the talks when Tehran knows they represent no threat (or a minimal one of holding up the sale of some dual-use valves and pipes)? Despite the considerable skill of European Union Foreign Minister Javier Solana, these talks are likely to go nowhere.
And what of those crazy clerics in Iran? Won't they get the wrong idea if Bush turns diplomatic softie? We know, of course, that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a man of "dangerous" mindset, as Time magazine put it this week. And of course we must try to operate from a position of as much strength as we can muster, which means actively considering muscular last-resort options that could include "forced" inspections of Iran's nuclear sites, or heaven forbid, airstrikes.
But was not Mao Zedong a dangerous man, too? (In fact, he made Ahmadinejad look like a prankster by comparison.) And wasn't Beijing feeling quite confident at the time of the China opening, in 1972, after watching America get bogged down for 10 years next door in Vietnam? Like China, Iran is a country with a long view of its interests. And it is feeling more vulnerable than you might expect right now. The latest postmortems from Lebanon indicate that Hizbullah, Tehran's principal proxy army, was severely hurt by Israeli airstrikes. Iran, if it were encouraged, has considerable interest in containing the Taliban-Al Qaeda alliance, its bitter ideological enemy (thanks to the Shia-Sunni split) and in preventing the civil war in Iraq that is now mainly being fomented by Shiite death squads. And Ahmadinejad's scurrilous rhetoric aside, the Iranians do not especially want to antagonize Israel either (one reason why, for 10 years before the inexperienced Ahmadinejad came to power, it was officially sanctioned policy in Tehran to tone down its anti-Zionist diatribes).
Does Iran want the bomb? Almost certainly. But there is ample ground between there and here, many middle stages where Tehran could be persuaded to pause indefinitely if it decided that the threat from the West (read: Washington) had subsided enough to do so. Bush went to war in Iraq hoping to bring the Shiites over to America's side, tilting the balance of power in Islam away from both the Sunni autocrats and the Sunni radicals. Now we are in the peculiar situation of embracing one set of Shiites (led by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki) and treating another as if they were lepers. It won't wash in the Muslim world. Nor in the real world. Bush doesn't need to "go" physically to Tehran of course, as Nixon did to China. But perhaps he and the Iranians could meet somewhere else—maybe Reykjavik?
As Kissinger wrote, Nixon was a Wilsonian by inclination like almost all U.S. presidents, Democrat and Republican—in other words, a believer in the concept that it is America's destiny to spread freedom around the globe (no, today's neocons didn't invent that; they only invented pre-emptive war, which is over with, as are they). But Nixon also knew that he had to operate with limited tools of leverage. As Kissinger wrote 10 years ago of that era, which increasingly resembles the one we're in now as Iraq looks more like Vietnam and our country remains split by bitter partisanship and burdened by debt: "The America of the late 1960s—stalemated in Indochina and torn by domestic conflict—required a more complex and nuanced definition of its international enterprise."
Bush once famously said that he doesn't "do nuance." No doubt he will resist taking this step to the last. He has a phobia about appearing weak, and he seems utterly locked into the view that strong leadership means never saying you're sorry or changing course. What his savvier advisers must make him understand—and there is no one who knows this better than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a thorough pragmatist—is that he has no choice at this point.
posted by huZmid at 11:18 PM
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