The following article, "A March of
Folly Toward Iran," was written by Paul R. Pillar and published
on ConsortiumNews.com (9/24/12), having first been published by The
National Interest. Pillar was a top analyst at the CIA and teaches
security studies at Georgetown University.
Two actions at the end of last week,
involving two different branches of the U.S. government, continued a
pattern of unthinking support for anything that gets perceived as
opposition to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
One such action was passage by the U.S.
Senate in the middle of the night of a resolution declaring that the
United States and other countries have a “vital interest” in
working “to prevent the Government of Iran from acquiring a nuclear
weapons capability.” The resolution “rejects any United States
policy that would rely on efforts to contain a nuclear
weapons-capable Iran.”
Never mind that this resolution buys
into Benjamin Netanyahu’s “red line” game of talking about
“nuclear weapons capability,” which by some measures Iran already
has now, rather than possession of a nuclear weapon, which Tehran
consistently disavows.
The most disturbing thing about the
resolution is its categorical rejection — in the wee hours of the
morning, no less, as Congress was rushing into its pre-election
recess — of an entire category of policy options with no
consideration whatsoever of the alternatives or any weighing of
advantages and disadvantages in comparison with the alternatives.
All we get to accompany the rejection
is a string of “whereas” clauses that repeat a familiar litany of
things people don’t like about Iran.
Evidently some members who might
otherwise have had reservations about this resolution were reassured
by a clause stating that “nothing in this resolution shall be
construed as an authorization for the use of force or a declaration
of war.” The resolution passed 90-1, with Sen. Rand Paul,
R-Kentucky, casting the only vote against.
But if the P5+1 (the countries of the
UN Security Council plus Germany) continue refusing to offer any
significant sanctions relief in return for major restrictions on
Iran’s nuclear activities and as a result the negotiations with
Tehran go nowhere, we will inevitably hear voices loudly proclaiming
that military force is the only way to abide by the policy objectives
that this resolution declares.
Congressional statements such as this
midnight resolution have a parallel from prior to the Iraq War: the
Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. Although most of the members who voted
for that legislation and the president (Bill Clinton) who signed it
may have had no intention of facilitating a war, it became a
benchmark that promoters of the war repeatedly referred to as a
bipartisan statement that regime change in Iraq was the policy of the
United States.
The other piece of anti-Iran posturing
last week was the decision by the Obama administration to remove the
Iranian cult-cum-terrorist group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq or MEK, from
the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations. Adding groups to
that list or removing groups from it is supposed to be a dull process
of administrative and legal review, and usually it is.
But the MEK’s case became the subject
of a lavishly funded public-relations campaign, unlike anything seen
with any other group in the 15-year history of the list. Prominent
figures, including well-known Democrats as well as Republicans,
reportedly received five-figure fees to speak on behalf of delisting
the group.
Many members of Congress and others,
even if they did not prostitute themselves through such arrangements,
naively believed that anything or anyone opposed to the Iranian
regime must be worth supporting.
No good will come out of this
subversion of the terrorist-group list with regard to conditions in
Iran, the behavior or standing of the Iranian regime, the values with
which the United States is associated or anything else.
The regime in Tehran will tacitly
welcome this move (while publicly denouncing it) because it helps to
discredit the political opposition in Iran — a fact not lost on
members of the Green Movement, who want nothing to do with the MEK.
The MEK certainly is not a credible
vehicle for regime change in Iran because it has almost no public
support there. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime will read the move as
another indication that the United States intends only to use
subversion and violence against it rather than reaching any deals
with it.
Although the list of foreign terrorist
organizations unfortunately has come to be regarded as a kind of
general-purpose way of bestowing condemnation or acceptance on a
group, we should remember that delisting changes nothing about the
character of the MEK. It is still a cult. It still has near-zero
popular support in Iran. It still has a despicably violent history.
As for more recent chapters of that
history, given how public the delisting issue became with the MEK, it
probably would have been appropriate for the Department of State to
address publicly the press reports, sourced to U.S. officials, that
the MEK has collaborated with Israel on terrorist assassinations of
Iranian nuclear scientists. But that, of course, would have required
the politically inconvenient act of publicly addressing Israeli
terrorism.
Attention to the issue of moving MEK
members from one camp in Iraq to another camp in Iraq, and about
threats to the group from within Iraq, appears to have become in the
end an excuse for caving in to the public-relations campaign. Whether
the group resides at Camp Ashraf or Camp Liberty doesn’t determine
whether it meets the definition under U.S. law of a foreign terrorist
organization.
Whatever problem there may have been at
Camp Ashraf, it was the MEK itself that was balking at a move, not
any Iraqis that threatened the group. If there is an issue of human
rights and refugees, it is mainly one of permitting rank-and-file
members to escape the control of the cult’s leaders.
The MEK story also has a parallel with
the Iraq War. A role that the MEK has to some extent assumed for
anti-Iran agitators in this country — and that the delisting will
only encourage — recalls the prewar role played by Ahmed Chalabi
and the Iraqi National Congress (INC).
Each case involved a group of exiles
with a slick talent for manipulating public opinion in the United
States but a paucity of support in their own countries. A possible
difference is that the MEK’s support in Iran is even less than that
of the INC in Iraq, given the former’s treasonous behavior (in
Iranian eyes) during the Iran-Iraq War.
Both of last week’s actions, which
involve both political parties and both the executive and legislative
branches of the U.S. government, are discouraging not only for what
they imply about discourse and policy on Iran but also for what they
say more generally about U.S. policy-making. The competitive politics
of an election campaign have not helped and probably have hurt.
Competitive politics did not have to
hurt, especially at a time the Romney campaign is groping for any
stick it can use to beat the Obama administration. On the MEK matter,
the administration could be legitimately criticized for
pusillanimously giving in to a terrorist group’s public-relations
campaign. It could be charged with appearing to convey approval to a
group whose behavior is repugnant to American values. It could be
further charged with hurting the cause of democracy in Iran and
providing propaganda points to the Iranian regime.
But the campaign evidently is sticking
with the usual simplistic approach that anyone who bashes that regime
must be a friend of ours — and besides, some prominent Romney
advisers are among those who have spoken publicly on the MEK’s
behalf.
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