by Daniel Pipes
As Americans seek to
find an alternative to the stark and unappetizing choice of accepting
Iran's rabid leadership having nuclear weapons or pre-emptively bombing
its nuclear facilities, one analyst offers a credible third path.
Interestingly, it's inspired by a long-ago policy toward a different foe
— the Reagan administration's ways of handling the Soviet Union — yet
this unlikely model offers a useful prototype.
Abraham D. Sofaer, a
former U.S. district judge and legal adviser to the State Department,
now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, argues in "Taking On Iran: Strength, Diplomacy and the Iranian Threat"
(Hoover Institution, 2013) that since the fall of the shah during the
Carter administration, Washington "has responded to Iranian aggression
with ineffective sanctions and empty warnings and condemnations."
Not since 1988, he
notes, has the U.S. government focused on the Iranian military force
that specifically protects the country's Islamic order and most often
attacks abroad, variously called the Pasdaran or Sepah in Persian and
the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC in English. This roughly
125,000-strong elite force, created in 1980, has an outsized role in
Iran's political and economic life. It possesses its own army, navy, and
air force units, it controls ballistic missile programs, and it shares
control over the country's nuclear program. It runs the Basij, which
enforces strict Islamic mores on the Iranian public. Its military forces
are more important than the regular armed forces. Its Quds Force of
about 15,000 agents spreads the Khomeini revolution abroad via
infiltration and assassination. Its graduates staff key positions in the
Iranian government.
The IRGC has played a
leading role in attacking Americans, their allies, and their interests,
especially when one includes the IRGC's many documented surrogates and
partners, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muqtada al-Sadr movement, even
the Taliban and al-Qaida. IRGC accomplishments include the 1983 Marine
barracks and U.S. Embassy bombings in Lebanon, the 1992 and 1994
bombings of Jewish targets in Argentina, the 1996 Khobar barracks
bombing in Saudi Arabia, the 2011 attempt to kill the Saudi ambassador
in Washington, and provisioning Hamas with missiles for its 2012 war
with Israel (which are already being re-provisioned).
In all, IRGC attacks
have caused the deaths of more than 1,000 American soldiers, and many
more members of other armed forces and noncombatants. The U.S.
government has condemned the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism and
designated it as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
Sofaer advocates a supple two-pronged approach to Tehran: "Confront IRGC aggression directly and negotiate with Iran."
Confrontation means
Washington exploits "the full range of options available to curb the
IRGC short of preventive attacks on nuclear sites." He argues that U.S.
forces have the right to and should target factories and storage
facilities for arms, facilities associated with the IRGC (bases, ports,
trucks, planes, ships), arms shipments about to be exported, and IRGC
units. Sofaer's goal is not just to curb IRGC violence but also to
"undermine IRGC credibility and influence, and help to convince Iran to
negotiate in earnest" over its nuclear weapons program.
Negotiations means talking to Tehran about outstanding issues, rather than trying to punish it with aloofness. Sofaer quotes James Dobbins,
a former special U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, as expressing this view:
"It is time to apply to Iran the policies which won the Cold War,
liberated the Warsaw Pact, and reunited Europe: détente and containment,
communication whenever possible, and confrontation whenever necessary.
We spoke to Stalin's Russia. We spoke to Mao's China. In both cases,
greater mutual exposure changed their system, not ours. It's time to
speak to Iran, unconditionally, and comprehensively." More broadly,
along with Chester A. Crocker,
another former American diplomat, Sofaer sees diplomacy as "the engine
that converts raw energy and tangible power into meaningful political
results."
Confronting and
negotiating in tandem, Sofaer expects, will put great pressure on Tehran
to improve its behavior generally (for example, regarding terrorism)
and possibly lead it to shut down the nuclear program, while leaving
available a pre-emptive strike on the table "if all else fails."
Former U.S. Secretary
of State George P. Shultz, in his foreword to "Taking on Iran," calls
Sofaer's idea "an alternative that should have been implemented long
ago." Indeed, the time is well overdue to respond to IRGC atrocities
with the language of force that Iranian leaders only understand — and
which has the additional benefit of possibly avoiding greater
hostilities.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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