BOOK REVIEW
Balanced diplomacy or Iranophobia redux? Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President. Selected
authors
Reviewed by Kaveh L Afrasiabi
A collection of articles by various United States experts on Middle Eastern
affairs, this book by the Council on Foreign Relations on first glance makes a
serious case for introducing major changes in US foreign policy toward the
turbulent Middle East, presently theater to interventionist wars and quagmires,
stalemated peace, a dangerous arms race and threats of nuclear proliferation.
However, the trouble is that beyond the semantics of "reorientation" and "major
adjustments", there is little to suggest
that the proposed strategies contain the necessary ingredients in terms of
their content to match their seductive appearance; the book's title is a
misnomer and the centrality attached to Iran's nuclear and other threats
reflects an unreconstructed diplomatic mindset that, if implemented by the next
president, will inevitably culminate in the extension of the present status quo
of stalemated relations between US and Iran for the foreseeable future.
The authors' self-checkmating of their noble effort to instigate a sea change
in Middle East policy is mainly due to the common theme that binds the
chapters, the primacy of Iran's threat, as a result of which the entire edifice
of "new diplomacy" or "game-changing diplomacy" falls by the wayside and gets
devoured by the corrosive influence of diplomatic atrophy; this even applies to
the contribution by Ray Takeyh, who espouses the lofty notion of a US-Iran
rapprochement. Takeyh's recycling of the other authors' Iranophobic false
assumption that Tehran is on the march toward nuclear weapons, and thus
represents a clear and present danger of nuclear proliferation, ultimately
undermines his arguments in favor of rapprochement.
But the blame for the rather egregious shortcoming of this book, giving it a
distinct alarmist flavor, belongs to the lead authors, Richard Haass and Martin
Indyk, whose adamant calls for "renewed emphasis on diplomacy as a tool of
American foreign policy" is ill-matched with their blatant Iranophobia: "By the
time the next president enters the Oval Office the hands of Iran's nuclear
clock will be approaching midnight." This leads the authors to advise the next
US president to pursue the "military option" that "should be explored closely
for what it could accomplish". Sound familiar?
Haass and Indyk naturally do not limit themselves to Iran's nuclear threat and,
instead, perceive this as part of a broader Iranian "challenge to the existing
order". They blame the Bush administration's "mishandling of Iraq and
Afghanistan" that has ostensibly "opened the door to an Iranian bid for
regional primacy", accuse Iran of following a hegemonic "my way works" policy
and promise that if the next president listens to their advice then
"considerable American influence can be recouped" and the US president will be
"able to say that 'America's way works".
Clearly, the book's intention is to restore American hegemony in the Middle
East and design a better strategy for dealing with the native anti-hegemonic
forces in the region.
This is rather unfortunate and quite simply will not help US national interests
that are currently bedeviled by the pursuit of hegemonic policies in the Middle
East and beyond. Washington requires a post-hegemonic worldview at the White
House, not the neo-hegemonic attitude put forward by the likes of Haass and
Indyk, prescriptions that in the final analysis are a recipe for disaster. For
instance, the necessity of furthering the Middle East peace process and
addressing the Palestinian "issue" has been relegated behind the top priority
status assigned to the Iran threat.
And what exactly does the nature of this threat consist of? Answer: Iran's
"breakout capability", the fact that Tehran is on the verge of being "capable
of producing large amounts of weapons grade fuel". In turn, this raises a
pertinent question: does Iran's latent potential represent a grave threat when
there are objective mechanisms in place that tie its hands and restrict its
ability to turn manifest or reach its latent potential?
Unfortunately, neither Haass nor Indyk nor Gary Samore, another contributor who
is a vocal voice of the anti-Iran lobby group United Against Nuclear Iran,
bother with such questions. The failure to do so undermines their false
assumptions about Iran's breakout capability. Nor do they bother to delve into
the specifics of Iran-International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cooperation, or
the fact that, per the admission of an IAEA official quoted in a recent report
by Anthony Cordesman and Khalid Al-Rodham, "the biggest smoking gun that anyone
was waving is now eliminated" as per the conclusions of the recent Work Plan
that addressed Iran's six "outstanding issues". [1]
Add to this the fact that Thomas Fingar, the number two US intelligence
official and deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence, has recently
admitted, in his interview with the Washington Times, that "I stand by that
estimate", which appeared in the November 2007 US Intelligence Estimate on Iran
(NIE). The NIE report stated that Iran's nuclear program has been peaceful
since 2003 and that "Iran has not diverted its nuclear activities to a nuclear
program."
Fingar should receive a medal of honor for his bravery, standing up to all the
heat applied on the US intelligence community to either recant or revise its
conclusion. Thus another question: why didn't the NIE report cite Iran's
uranium enrichment activities as evidence of weapons proliferation, just as a
number of US pundits such as Henry Kissinger[2], who has criticized the NIE
report precisely on this point, have done?
The answer is straightforward. In the absence of any smoking gun or evidence of
military diversion, no US intelligence official in his or her right mind could
appease Kissinger and others in light of the legality of Iran's nuclear program
under the articles of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But, perhaps,
with Fingar stepping down, we must await a worse replacement, someone willing
to stoop below the NPT standards and flat out accuse Iran of engaging in
nuclear proliferation due to its mere involvement in enrichment activities. If
so, then this would be nothing short of another giant step backward for US
diplomacy, much as it may satisfy the likes of Haass and Indyk.
In conclusion, the net worth of this book restores Iranophobia under the guise
of new Middle East diplomacy, while undervaluing what Deputy Secretary of State
William Burns has characterized as the "overlapping interests" of US and Iran
in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against narcotics trafficking. Short of jettisoning
the exaggerated fear of Iran, giving due attention to Iran's constructive role
in the region, and fully exploring the policy consequences of those shared
interests, it is simply impossible to restore the crippled chariot of US
diplomacy toward Iran and, indeed, the whole region.
Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President. A
CFR–Saban Center at Brookings Book, December 2008. Authors: Richard N Haass,
Martin Indyk, Stephen Biddle, Michael E O'Hanlon, Kenneth M Pollack, Suzanne
Maloney, Ray Takeyh, Bruce Riedel, Gary Samore, Steven A Cook, Shibley Telhami,
Isobel Coleman, Tamara Cofman Wittes, Daniel Byman, Steven Simon. ISBN
978-0-8157-3869-5. Price US$24.95, 256 pages.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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The authors' self-checkmating of their noble effort to instigate a sea change
in Middle East policy is mainly due to the common theme that binds the
chapters, the primacy of Iran's threat, as a result of which the entire edifice
of "new diplomacy" or "game-changing diplomacy" falls by the wayside and gets
devoured by the corrosive influence of diplomatic atrophy; this even applies to
the contribution by Ray Takeyh, who espouses the lofty notion of a US-Iran
rapprochement. Takeyh's recycling of the other authors' Iranophobic false
assumption that Tehran is on the march toward nuclear weapons, and thus
represents a clear and present danger of nuclear proliferation, ultimately
undermines his arguments in favor of rapprochement.
