WASHINGTON - "Let us state the obvious,"
wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht, the resident Persian
Gulf specialist at the neo-conservative American
Enterprise Institute in the Weekly Standard's
feature article on Monday. "The new president of
the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad,
is a godsend."
"Thank goodness for Mahmud
Ahmadinejad," wrote Ilan Berman, the
neo-conservative author of a hawkish new book
Tehran Rising:
Iran's Challenge to the
United States, in the National Review Online
last week.
It's a sentiment that has been
echoed in dozens of recent forums, publications
and broadcast appearances out of Washington, and
particularly in the two weeks since Tehran broke
the seals put in place two years ago by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at its
uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz. Tehran had
originally promised to freeze further research on
the nuclear-fuel cycle pending the outcome of
negotiations with Britain, France and Germany, the
so-called EU-3.
"Ahmadinejad's inflamed
rhetoric against America, Israel and the Jews,
which is in keeping with the style and substance
of the president's former comrades in the
praetorian Revolutionary Guard Corps, combined
with the clerical regime's decision to restart
uranium enrichment, has returned some sense of
urgency to efforts to thwart Tehran," wrote
Gerecht.
Indeed, the Iranian president,
with his public suggestions that Israel be "wiped
off the face of the map" and that the Nazi
Holocaust against European Jewry was a "myth", has
prompted comparisons to Adolf Hitler himself, less
than three years after Saddam Hussein was depicted
as the Fuehrer's latest
incarnation.
Ahmadinejad "has cast himself
as Adolf Hitler reincarnated", according to one of
the Wall Street Journal's regular columnists,
George Melloan, while others, including Senator
John McCain, have suggested that the current
moment is equivalent to Europe in the 1930s.
Ahmadinejad's declarations, which are seen
by many experts in Washington as related at least
as much to his domestic political strategy as to
his foreign-policy world view, have been manna
from heaven for neo-conservatives, who have long
had Tehran in their gunsights.
They have
also stirred very serious concerns among the
generally more dovish US Jewish community, whose
influence in the Democratic Party has already
spurred several leaders, including its presumptive
2008 presidential nominee, New York Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton, to attack President George
W Bush for being too complacent about the threat
posed by Iran's nuclear program.
These
Democrats argue that the administration must work
urgently to get Iran referred by the IAEA to the
United Nations Security Council and then put
maximum pressure on Russia and China to go along
with far-reaching economic and diplomatic
sanctions, including a cutoff in supplies of
refined gasoline to the country.
Their
demands generally echo those of the most powerful
Israeli lobby in Washington, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee. In an unprecedented
action in November, the group publicly criticized
the Bush administration for failing to act more
aggressively against Iran. The influential
American Jewish Committee also announced its own
international campaign to impose a global and
diplomatic and economic embargo against Iran until
it halts its nuclear program.
That the
administration, which promulgated and then
implemented a doctrine of preventive war against
presumed enemies allegedly bent on acquiring
weapons of mass destruction, should come under
attack from all these sources for excessive
passivity is ironic. But it is also testimony to
the degree that it has been forced by its Iraq
adventure to adopt what can only be described - to
the disgust of the neo-conservatives, in
particular - as both a new humility and a new
realism with regard to Tehran.
Noting how
Iraq had overstretched US ground forces, officials
who bragged in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq
invasion in 2003 that "everyone wants to go to
Baghdad, [but] real men want to go to Tehran", now
admit that such an option is completely out of the
question. The most Washington can do militarily,
in their opinion, is to use air power to take out
as many nuclear-related sites as possible -
reportedly more than 300, requiring three days of
non-stop bombing - and hope for the best.
But the military option - exercised early
and eagerly in Iraq - is seen as the absolute last
resort by the administration. Contrary to its
neo-conservative and Democratic critics, the White
House concedes that the potential costs of an
attack - skyrocketing oil prices, a renewed
Shi'ite insurgency in southern Iraq, a wave of
terrorist attacks by Lebanon's Hezbollah, and new
schisms in a North Atlantic Treaty Organization
alliance that Washington has tried hard to mend -
could very well outweigh the benefits.
In
contrast to their confidence about how US troops
would be greeted as liberators in Iraq with
"flowers and sweets", they also concede that
military strikes, and even indiscriminate economic
sanctions, would rally otherwise disaffected
Iranians to the defense of the regime.
They also recognize that unilateral steps
by Washington, such as enforcement of a 1996 law
authorizing the president to impose severe
economic sanctions against any foreign company
that invests more than US$20 million a year in
Iran's energy sector, will risk the unity on Iran
policy that currently prevails between the US and
the Europeans, as well as hopes that Russia and
China will cooperate with a broader Western
strategy.
"In all my conversations with
senior administration officials, I have never
heard them be so cautious about what they can know
and tentative about what they can achieve," wrote
New York Times columnist David Brooks on Sunday.
"Bush officials have been walking away
from broad economic sanctions and preemptive
strikes," he noted in a column titled "Hating the
bomb", which predicted that Iran could well
replace Iraq as the major foreign-policy issue of
the 2008 presidential campaign.
His
conclusion, that "all the options are terrible",
is widely shared, even by fellow neo-conservatives
who themselves appear somewhat at a loss about
what to do, other than to depict Ahmadinejad as
the new Hitler and his more outrageous
declarations as the new Mein Kampf.
They can only continue to call for regime
change through aid to the opposition, including
possible minority secessionist movements; attack
anyone, particularly anti-interventionist
Democrats and European diplomats, who suggests
that the West may have to live with an Iranian
bomb; and keep the "military option" of air
strikes against nuclear targets alive and kicking.
