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Mr. Chairman, Honorable Members. Thank you for
this opportunity to testify. On July 15, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton spoke of engagement in the course of a broader foreign policy
address. "We cannot be afraid or unwilling to engage," she declared,
adding, "As long as engagement might advance our interests and our values,
it is unwise to take it off the table. Negotiations can provide insight
into regimes' calculations and the possibility—even if it seems
remote—that a regime will eventually alter its behavior in exchange for
the benefits of acceptance into the international community." About the
Islamic Republic the Secretary of State said, "We know that refusing to
deal with the Islamic Republic has not succeeded in altering the Iranian
march toward a nuclear weapon, reducing Iranian support for terror, or
improving Iran's treatment of its citizens."
Secretary Clinton is correct to note the
challenges the Islamic Republic poses, but is incorrect to blame her
predecessors rather than the Islamic Republic itself for the failure of
diplomacy. It is a myth that the United States has not engaged Iran. Every
administration since Jimmy Carter's has engaged the Islamic Republic.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan criticized the Carter
administration's diplomacy toward Iran but then, faced with his own
Iranian-instigated hostage crisis, also sought to offer incentives. During
his inaugural address, George H.W. Bush extended an olive branch to Iran.
"Good will begets good will. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly
moves on," he declared. Days later, he clarified, "I don't want to…think
that the status quo has to go on forever. There was a period of time when
we had excellent relations with Iran." Bush offered an olive branch with
the promise of better relations upon the release of the hostages, but
refused to make concessions or offer incentives, even as prominent foreign
policy voices like Rep. Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East, urged him "to send some kind of
gesture." The Supreme Leader dismissed Bush's initiative, however. "Iran
does not need America," he told Tehran radio.
When Bill Clinton took office in 1993,
relations with Iran were frozen. Neither Khomeini's death nor the
accession of Rafsajani had changed Iranian behavior. Indeed, as the Oslo
Accords brought real hope of an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, U.S.
concern at Iranian attempts to disrupt the peace process grew. Dual
Containment became the benchmark strategy during Clinton's first term. As
Martin Indyk, the lead National Security Council aide on the Middle East
told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "We do not seek
confrontation but we will not normalize relations with Iran until and
unless Iran's policies change across the board."
As Iranian sponsorship of terrorism and its
pursuit of nuclear technology accelerated, the Clinton administration
ratcheted up sanctions. Clinton Administration issued two Executive Orders
in 1995, the first prohibiting transactions that would lead to the
development of Iranian petroleum resources, and the second imposing a ban
on U.S. trade with and investment in Iran. Then, in 1996, Congress passed
and Clinton signed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act which empowered the United
States to act against private companies investing in Iran. Many U.S.
policymakers, however, were unhappy with containment. "There seems little
justification for the treatment the United States currently accords Iran
because of its nuclear program," former National Security Advisors
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft argued, suggesting an end to
unilateral sanctions and proffering of incentives, such as greater
commercial exchange.
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami's election,
however, led the Clinton administration to renew its efforts at dialogue.
Speaking to the parliament after his swearing-in on August 4, 1997,
Khatami declared, "We are in favor of a dialogue between civilizations and
a détente in our relations with the outside world." Khatami's call for
dialogue led to a proliferation of study group reports, each urging
Washington to engage Tehran with few if any preconditions. Most of these
reports with the benefit of hindsight are painfully naïve.
Clinton jumped at the chance to bring Iran in
from the cold. He ordered withdrawn and destroyed the FBI's report
detailing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' involvement in the Khobar
Towers bombing. Within weeks, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sent a
letter to Khatami expressing Washington's desire for
government-to-government dialogue. Khatami did not reply directly, but
U.S. officials believed his subsequent statements signaled a willingness
to engage. In December 1997, for example, Khatami expressed "great
respect" for the "great people of the United States," and called for "a
thoughtful dialogue." Reporters remarked on his "markedly different" tone
from his predecessors. In a January 1998 CNN interview, Khatami reiterated
these themes, declaring, "Not only do we not harbor any ill wishes for the
American people, but in fact we consider them to be a great nation," and
outlined a desire for "dialogue of civilizations."
Albright responded in a speech to the Asia
Society, declaring that Clinton "welcomed" Khatami's call and would,
accordingly, streamline procedures to issue Iranians visas and facilitate
academic and cultural exchanges. The initiative floundered after the
Iranian government refused to move forward with any dialogue so long as
U.S. sanctions and trade bans remained in place. The Clinton
administration refused. While former National Security Advisor Brent
Scowcroft criticized the Clinton administration's obstinacy, Clinton's
caution was prudent. Years later, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, the Khatami
government spokesman, acknowledged Tehran's lack of sincerity, explaining,
"We had one overt policy, which was one of negotiation and confidence
building, and a covert policy, which was continuation of the
activities."
Albright continued pursuit of dialogue and
engagement into the waning days of the Clinton administration. On March
17, 2000, shortly before the Iranian New Year celebrations, Clinton spoke
to the American Iranian Council. She began by acknowledging many Iranian
grievances. While Clinton did not apologize for the CIA-sponsored 1953
coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, The Washington Post
nevertheless called her statement, "the boldest attempt yet by the Clinton
administration to capitalize on the movement toward moderation in Tehran."
She also made a number of concessions, including an end to the ban on U.S.
imports of Iranian pistachios and caviar, two of Iran's most lucrative
non-oil industries, a relaxation of visa restrictions upon Iranians
wishing to travel to the United States, and a start to the process of
releasing assets frozen almost two decades earlier during the hostage
crisis.
The Iranian government at first reacted
positively to Albright's speech. Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian, the Islamic
Republic's ambassador at the United Nations, said that Iran would be
"prepared to adopt proportionate and positive measures in return." While
his response made headlines, a year later, Iranian authorities had not
offered any discernible measures. Khatami explained that the United States
had simply not offered enough for Albright's initiative to merit any
response. Ultimately, however, Albright's unilateral concessions
backfired. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi responded to Albright's
"confessions" of past U.S. malfeasance by demanding reparations. On July
16, 2000, the Iranian government tested a Shihab-3 missile, a deliberate
attempt to undercut accelerating Arab-Israeli peace talks. Supreme Leader
Khamenei poured cold water on any optimism when, in a July 27, 2000
statement, he argued that any negotiations, let alone rapprochement, with
Washington would be "an insult and treason to the Iranian people."
Despite the demonization of George W. Bush, the
current president has been more open to diplomacy with the Islamic
republic than any president since Carter. In 2001 and 2002, U.S. and
Iranian diplomats met to discuss Afghanistan and, the next year, Iranian
UN Ambassador Mohammad Javad-Zarif met senior U.S. officials Zalmay
Khalilzad and Ryan Crocker in Geneva.
Indeed, Bush has found himself besieged from
all sides. Proponents of diplomacy condemn Bush for the moral clarity
inherent in the January 2002 "axis of evil" speech and argue that the
president's State of the Union statements sidetracked diplomacy. Bush's
rhetoric, however, was not gratuitous, but rather reflected intelligence
which showed that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was acting in
discord with the promises of Iranian diplomats, apparently with the
acquiescence of Iran's top leadership. Some say Bush missed a Grand
Bargain opportunity in 2003, but, as even pro-engagement officials like
former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage acknowledge, this to be
a myth that resulted from wrongly ascribing Iranian authorship to an
attention-seeking Swiss diplomat's personal initiative. Meanwhile, those
with less tolerance for Iran's support of terrorism, its violent
opposition to the Middle East peace process, and its nuclear-weapons
ambitions condemn Bush for having pursued a policy of rapprochement at
odds with his rhetoric.
Many advocates of engagement say that its
previous failure can be ascribed to the failure to provide adequate
incentive or to embrace truly the strategy. Here, the European Union
provides insight, as it long pursued engagement unencumbered by meaningful
coercion. Beginning in 1992, the European Union undertook a policy of
critical dialogue and engagement. Critical engagement did not lead to any
noticeable improvement in Iranian human rights conditions which, indeed,
worsened during the course of the engagement. In 1995, for example,
Iranian authorities passed a law combining the role of prosecutor and
judge in court. Persecution of religious minorities like Baha'is
increased, and censorship remained heavy-handed. Between 1992 and 1996,
the Iranian government refused to allow a UN Special Representative on the
Human Rights Situation in Iran to visit the country. Between 1995 and
1996, for example, arguably the height of Critical Dialogue, Iranian use
of the death penalty doubled.
Perhaps, as many realists argue, human rights
should not be a paramount U.S. concern. Alas, engagement has also failed
to alter Iranian support for terrorism or proliferation activities, issues
which more directly impact U.S. national security. Let me dispense with
the early 1990s, when the Iranian government answered European engagement
with state-sponsored assassinations of dissidents and terror bombings as
far afield as Argentina. On the nuclear issue, the Europeans' dialogue
fared no better than on human right. The 2007 National Intelligence
Estimate indicated that the Islamic Republic maintained a covert military
nuclear program until 2003; that is, throughout Khatami's Dialogue of
Civilizations. IAEA reports from the period suggest a "deliberate counter
effort that spanned many years, to conceal material, facilities, and
activities that were required to have been declared under the safeguards
agreement – material, facilities and activities that covered the entire
spectrum of the nuclear fuel cycle, including experiments in enrichment
and reprocessing." Earlier this summer, Hassan Rowhani, Iran's former
nuclear negotiator, acknowledged to an Iranian interviewer that the
Iranian leadership's previous suspension of uranium enrichment at the
behest of European negotiators was more tactical than a true concession.
The Islamic Republic was motivated, he said, by its desire "to counter
global consensus against Iran." He noted, however, "We did not accept
suspension in construction of centrifuges and continued the effort. . . .
We needed a greater number." Despite finding in 2003 that Iran had been
developing an uranium centrifuge enrichment program for 18 years, and a
laser enrichment program for 12 years, Germany Foreign Minister Joschka
Fischer corralled European Union authorities to urge giving the Islamic
Republic another chance so as not to diminish leverage. Too often, the
desire to preserve leverage to wield in future diplomacy becomes a chief
argument against ever utilizing leverage or pursuing punitive measures
based on an adversary's actions. In the diplomatic calculation, ensuring
continuation of diplomacy supersedes reality.
Of course, diplomacy is the strategy of first
resort. It always has been. Unfortunately, it does not always succeed.
Alas, engagement has shown itself to no magic formula for three reasons.
First, it takes two to tango. What Carter, Bush the elder, Clinton, and
Bush the younger learned -- but their domestic critics have not -- is that
the impediment to engagement lies not in Washington but in Tehran. The day
after Rice offered Iran an end to its isolation, Ahmadinejad dismissed
Rice's offer as "a propaganda move." When Undersecretary of State William
Burns sat down with his Iranian counterpart in Geneva in July 2008,
Mohammad Ja'afi Assadi, commander of Iranian Republican Guards Corps
ground forces, quipped that Washington's desperation showed that "America
has no other choice but to leave the Middle East region beaten and
humiliated." On October 12, 2008, Vice President Mehdi Kalhor said: "As
U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continue their
support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. are off the
agenda."
Second, for diplomacy to be effective, the
target government must empower its diplomats to negotiate over contested
issues and then abide by agreements reached. Unfortunately, the Iranian
nuclear program appears more the purview of the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Office of the Supreme Leader rather than the
Iranian Foreign Minister. Neither the IRGC nor the Supreme Leader have
expressed willingness to negotiate.
Third, the Obama administration appears intent
to sequence policies. Comprehensive strategies, however, fit into the DIME
paradigm, and have not only diplomatic, but also informational, military,
and economic components. Absent any effort to lay the groundwork either
for containment or deterrence – both military strategies -- Washington is
signaling to its allies that the U.S. commitment to protect them is
empty.
Arab states and Iran's other neighbors appear
more concerned than Congress that neither Obama nor Clinton have
articulated by what metric the administration will judge success. This is
of paramount importance to prevent Iranian officials from simply running
down the clock.
If it appears that Iranian authorities mean
only to run down the clock as they acquire greater capability, regional
states may calculate that they have no choice but to make greater
accommodation to Tehran's interests. This will hamper U.S. efforts to win
broad diplomatic support for its strategy. When poorly-timed and
considered, diplomacy can ironically undercut its own efficacy.
The danger is apparent. Should Israeli
officials believe that the West will stand aside as Iran achieves nuclear
capability and that a nuclear Islamic Republic poses an existential threat
to the Jewish state, they may conclude that they have no choice but to
launch a preemptive military strike--an event that could quickly lead to a
regional conflagration from which the United States would have difficulty
remaining aloof, regardless of the White House's intentions.
Related
Topics: Iran, US policy
Michael Rubin
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