Israel Matzav

Too late for regime change in Iran?

In Wednesday's Washington Post, Michael Gerson argues that the Obama administration should try supporting Iran's revolutionaries as a means of countering that country's nuclear threat.

Iran's theocracy has become a military junta with a veneer of religion. There are fatigues beneath the robes. On the nuclear issue, the main question is: Does this regime believe that nuclear weapons will help ensure its survival? There is every reason to believe that it does. As the disorders since June revealed the regime's vulnerability, it has sped up its nuclear program. Drained of legitimacy and fearing a color revolution, Iran's military government seems to believe that the bomb will confer influence and permanence. It is not an irrational calculation.

In this light, Obama's policy of setting deadlines for cooperation that are violated with impunity, and continually extending the hand of engagement after it is slapped again and again, is both weak and irrelevant. But the alternatives are not easy or obvious. The crippling economic isolation of Iran is worth trying, again. But it would require a number of unreliable nations to sacrifice large economic interests in Iran -- something they have been unwilling to do before. Direct military options are uncertain and opposed by the military itself. It is difficult to imagine Obama, the Great Deliberator, taking actions that George W. Bush concluded were too risky.

But the security implications of a nuclear Iran could be greater than failure in Afghanistan. Iran is an unstable revolutionary power with global ambitions and terrorist ties. Nuclear proliferation does not get more dangerous than this.

There is, however, an untried option. So far, President Obama has seemed to view Iran's ongoing democratic uprising as a pesky obstacle to engagement. The administration has reduced funding for human rights programs in Iran and looked the other way as exiled opponents of the Iranian regime have been attacked within Iraq.

In addition to serious economic and military pressure, Obama could try the strategy the Iranian regime most fears: supporting, overtly and covertly, the democratic resistance against military rule. Not out of idealism, but realism. It would be a source of leverage on the Iranian regime, at a time when American leverage is limited. And it might hasten the return of civilian control in Iran, so that America would actually have a negotiating partner.

Unfortunately, this won't work for two reasons. First, there's not enough time. Iran is too close to attaining its goal and the revolutionaries are too far from attaining theirs for it to have an effect. Obama has missed the boat on supporting the revolutionaries (more about that here).

But nearly as important is the fact that Iran's opposition is as strongly in favor of continuing its nuclear quest as the current government. Moussavi, the opposition leader, helped to drive Iran's rejection of the P - 5+1 proposal to ship its uranium out of the country. And Moussavi has continued to criticize Ahmadinejad for 'giving away' Iran's 'nuclear rights.'

Getting behind Iran's revolution might have helped if it had been done immediately in June. It's too late for that now.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:54 PM