Foreign Affairs:January/February 2008:The Costs of Containing Iran

The Costs of Containing Iran via the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/cfr/world/20080101faessay_v87n1_nasr.html?pagewan...
Direct Link:Foreign Affairs
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080101faessay87106/vali-nasr-ray-takeyh/...

Over the past year, Washington has come to see the containment of Iran as the primary objective of its Middle East policy. It holds Tehran responsible for rising violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon's tribulations, and Hamas' intransigence and senses that the balance of power in the region is shifting toward Iran and its Islamist allies.

Curbing Tehran's growing influence is thus necessary for regional security.Vice President Dick Cheney announced this new direction last May on the deck of the U.S.S. John C. Stennis in the Persian Gulf. "We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats," Cheney said. "We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed a similar sentiment: "Iran constitutes the single most important single-country strategic challenge to the United States and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see." Meanwhile, Iran's accelerating nuclear program continues to haunt Washington and much of the international community, adding to their sense of urgency. Taking a page out of its early Cold War playbook, Washington hopes to check and possibly reduce Tehran's growing influence much as it foiled the Soviet Union's expansionist designs: by projecting its own power while putting direct pressure on its enemy and building a broad-based alliance against it. Washington has been building up the U.S. Navy's presence in the Persian Gulf and using harsh rhetoric, raising the specter of war.

At the same time, it funds a $75 million democracy-promotion program supporting regime change in Tehran.In recent months, Washington has rallied support for a series of United Nations resolutions against Iran's nuclear program and successfully pushed through tough informal financial sanctions that have all but cut Iran out of international financial markets. It has officially designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and the IRG's elite al Quds Army as a supporter of terrorism, allowing the Treasury Department to target the groups' assetsand the U.S. military to harass and apprehend their personnel in Iraq.

Washington is also working to garner support from what it now viewsas moderate governments in the Middle East -- mostly authoritarianArab regimes it once blamed for the region's myriad problems. Washington's goal is to eliminate Iran's influence in the Arabworld by rolling back Tehran's gains to date and denying it the supportof allies -- in effect drawing a line from Lebanon to Oman toseparate Iran from its Arab neighbors. The Bush administrationhas rallied support among Arab governments to oppose Iranianpolicies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. It is tryingto buttress the military capability of Persian Gulf states by providinga $20 billion arms package to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates.According to Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, one of thearms sales' primary objectives is "to enable these countries to strengthentheir defenses and therefore to provide a deterrence against Iranianexpansion and Iranian aggression in the future." And through a seriesof regional conclaves and conferences, the Bush administrationhopes to rejuvenate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process partly inthe hope of refocusing the energies of the region's governments on the threat posed by Iran.

Excerpt Iran is not, in fact, seeking tocreate disorder in order to fulfill some scriptural promise,nor is it an expansionist power with unquenchable ambitions. Not unlike Russiaand China, Iran is a growing power seeking to become a pivotal state in its region.

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.Therein lies what is most problematic about the authors' flawed perspective on how to deal with Iran. What the authors refer to as "religious scripture" in summarily dismissing what is in fact what most consider the raison d'etre for what drives Iran, the fundamentalist zealousness that anchors, permeates everything they have managed to unleash against the West, religious scripture as the very motivation for creating disorder in hastening the arrival of the 12th Imam.

This is not just mere rhetoric but it is religious scripture that has in fact been instrumental in what drove Osama Bin Laden to carry out the 9-11 attacks.