Credibility Can Only Be Lost Once

Credibility, like virginity, can only be lost once and never recovered. Hence, the problem the Bush administration has in dealing with Iran is that having been so wrong about Iraq, who can believe it now? I recognize that a majority of Americans shrugged off going to war on false premises. The rest of the world is not so forgiving. The Bush administration's unprofessional, undiplomatic approach to the question of Iran's nuclear intentions sounds too much like the Iraqi dialogue. That dialogue consisted of American officials calling the Iraqis liars and the Iraqis denying they had weapons of mass destruction. Now we're hearing the same childish dialogue directed at Iran. Iran insists it is not attempting to build nuclear weapons, and the United States replies with name-calling. It's sad to say, but the Iranian government currently has more credibility than the Bush administration. All credibility was destroyed by the administration's militant insistence that it had "factual evidence" of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "We know where they are," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said with his smug grin. Everybody from the president and the vice president to the national-security adviser to the secretary of state kept belligerently insisting that those weapons existed and scoffed at everyone who expressed any skepticism. And every one of them was 100 percent wrong.

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Iran's Stealthy Nukes

Apparently President Bush believes he has been given another four years to subvert and/or replace the half-dozen or so regimes he deems to be either a threat to the "freedom" of its citizens or to our "national security." Iran is at the top of his list. How else to explain the concerted effort this week by the neo-crazies and their media sycophants to subvert the International Atomic Energy Agency's director general's report to the IAEA Board of Governors on the status of his two-year go-anywhere, see-anything inspection of Iran's nuclear programs.

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Will Iran Be Next?
Soldiers, spies, and diplomats conduct a classic Pentagon war game—with sobering results

Most of our panelists felt that the case against a U.S. strike was all the more powerful against an Israeli strike. With its much smaller air force and much more limited freedom to use airspace, Israel would probably do even less "helpful" damage to Iranian sites. The hostile reaction—against both Israel and the United States—would be potentially more lethal to both Israel and its strongest backer. A realistic awareness of these constraints will put the next President in an awkward position. In the end, according to our panelists, he should understand that he cannot prudently order an attack on Iran. But his chances of negotiating his way out of the situation will be greater if the Iranians don't know that. He will have to brandish the threat of a possible attack while offering the incentive of economic and diplomatic favors should Iran abandon its plans. "If you say there is no acceptable military option, then you end any possibility that there will be a non-nuclear Iran," David Kay said after the war game. "If the Iranians believe they will not suffer any harm, they will go right ahead." Hammes agreed: "The threat is always an important part of the negotiating process. But you want to fool the enemy, not fool yourself. You can't delude yourself into thinking you can do something you can't." Is it therefore irresponsible to say in public, as our participants did and we do here, that the United States has no military solution to the Iran problem? Hammes said no. Iran could not be sure that an American President, seeing what he considered to be clear provocation, would not strike. "You can never assume that just because a government knows something is unviable, it won't go ahead and do it. The Iraqis knew it was not viable to invade Iran, but they still did it. History shows that countries make very serious mistakes." So this is how the war game turned out: with a finding that the next American President must, through bluff and patience, change the actions of a government whose motives he does not understand well, and over which his influence is limited. "After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers," Sam Gardiner said of his exercise. "You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work."

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  thanks to Cursor

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro on the geopolitics of the Iranian bomb

Imagine a pious Muslim faced with a ban on fabricating a certain kind of weapon. He is committed to obeying unquestioningly the fatwas of his religious leader and yet discovers that producing such a weapon, or threatening to do so, is a strong lever for gaining benefits from a powerful group living in the neighborhood. Replace "a pious Muslim" with "Iran," and "a powerful group" with the 25-member European Union (EU), and the above sentences aptly sum up the current Iranian-EU relationship. Enriched by millions of daily encounters in bazaars, Iranians are adept at bargaining and confident in the knowledge, acquired over centuries, that skillful bargaining and brinkmanship go hand in hand. This is what just happened in Paris between the officials of Iran and the the EU troika -- France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The subject was Tehran's nuclear program; the occasion, the run-up to the finalization of an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report for its 35-strong board of governors on November 15. The Iranians dragged out the bargaining until the last minute before initialing a deal subject to the approval of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) in Tehran. It was a deal that was meant to prepare the way for further negotiations. Iran has agreed to suspend its uranium enrichment and reprocessing programs until a "grand bargain" is reached in which the EU guarantees nuclear, political, and trade concessions in return for Tehran's indefinite suspension of the same programs. Though negotiated by the troika, the agreement's ownership lies with the European Union as a whole. To the undisguised relish of the Iranians, this deal killed the Bush administration's pet plan to refer the Iranian case to the United Nations Security Council for censure or the possible imposition of sanctions for its alleged breaches of the IAEA nuclear protocol.

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