by Elliott Abrams
In his address
to the U.N. General Assembly in September 1987, U.S. President Ronald
Reagan spoke a few words about the relationship between peace and
freedom:
"Freedom in Nicaragua
or Angola or Afghanistan or Cambodia or Eastern Europe or South Africa
or any place else on the globe is not just an internal matter. Some time
ago the Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel warned the world that
'respect for human rights is the fundamental condition and the sole
genuine guarantee of true peace.' And Andrei Sakharov in his Nobel
lecture said: 'I am convinced that international confidence, mutual
understanding, disarmament, and international security are
inconceivable without an open society with freedom of information,
freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the right to travel
and choose the country in which one wishes to live.' Freedom serves
peace; the quest for peace must serve the cause of freedom. Patient
diplomacy can contribute to a world in which both can flourish."
This is a message worth
keeping in mind as our negotiators, and those of other P5+1 nations,
meet with Iranian officials to seek a nuclear agreement before the July
20 deadline. The road to peace does not lie through weak agreements
with brutal dictatorships. In the end, peace and reconciliation between
Iran and the United States are certainly possible, indeed likely --
but not between the Islamic republic and the United States.
"The quest for peace
must serve the cause of freedom," Reagan rightly said, and any
agreement that strengthens the Iranian regime -- that enhances its
reputation, that gives it greater leverage in the Middle East, or that
strengthens its stranglehold on the Iranian people -- serves neither the
cause of freedom nor that of peace.
I've heard Obama
administration officials claim they were following a Reagan-like policy
toward Iran, negotiating with a hostile power just as he negotiated
with the Soviet Union. But Reagan didn't just negotiate; he negotiated
and he denounced. He called the USSR an "evil empire" that would end up
on the "ash heap of history." His moral clarity was powerful --
powerful enough, Natan Sharansky later wrote, to reach into the Gulag.
Here's how Sharansky saw it:
"It was the great
brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had proclaimed the
Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a long
list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil
Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right
next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who
wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This
was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a
spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead.
President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in
the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the
Soviet Union.
"It was one of the most
important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew
it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them,
and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never,
ever be untold now. This was the end of Lenin's 'Great October
Bolshevik Revolution' and the beginning of a new revolution, a freedom
revolution -- Reagan's Revolution.
"We were all in and out
of punishment cells so often -- me more than most -- that we developed
our own tapping language to communicate with each other between the
walls. A secret code. We had to develop new communication methods to
pass on this great, impossible news."
There has been no such
moment in the Obama administration, which has been chasing the dream of
a rapprochement with the Islamic republic. This is a morally ambiguous
policy at best, but it is also impractical and counterproductive. This
is true both in Congress, where many critics (in both parties) fear a
weak Obama policy toward Iran, one searching desperately for an
agreement that might be proffered as a great foreign policy
achievement, and in the region, where our Gulf Arab allies and Israel
all fear a nuclear deal that leads to greatly reduced American
resistance to Iranian aggression, subversion, and support for
terrorism.
Stronger and clearer
rhetoric about the crimes of the Islamic republic would reassure
members of Congress and U.S. allies in the region -- and would make a
nuclear deal more likely to pass muster on Capitol Hill. Ironically it
would also make it more likely that a decent deal, if one could be
negotiated, would be accepted by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for whom
rapprochement with the "Great Satan" is a nightmare, not an objective.
Put another way, a tougher American stance toward the Islamic republic
will not lead Khamenei to back away from a nuclear deal; he seeks no
close or cooperative relationship.
Nothing we do with
respect to Iran should deepen the regime's hold, and we should be
trying in any practical way we have -- improving Internet access for
Iranians, for example, and making very clear in our rhetoric that we
understand the brutal nature of the regime's repression -- to side with
the people of Iran against their oppressors. To repeat what Reagan
said for yet another time, "The quest for peace must serve the cause of
freedom."
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece can be found on Abrams' blog "Pressure Points."
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=8947
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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