The slow motion crisis surrounding Iran and its ambiguous desire to acquire nuclear technology has worsened in recent days, with Iran announcing its decision to resume uranium enrichment, and Europe thus announcing its intention, as expected following such a move, to go to the UN Security Council to discuss possible sanctions.
We've had a number of diaries discussing this topic here, many worrying that war, or at least some kind of attack, initiated by Bush was very much possible. Despite the many rational arguments that point to the stupidity of doing this (which I discuss below), what makes me think that the probability of such conflict has increased is the emergence in many unrelated newspaper columns of the idea that Europe was given a chance to prove that "soft power" and diplomacy could work but failed, and thus that hard power (and implicitly, the Bush way) must now prevail.
We have to fight this false "meme" back.
This has always been a fairly usual fare of the hard right, as exemplified in this
recent article from FrontPageMag:
Against the Islamist death cult it is not reassuring to posit Western Europe with its declining birth rates, enduring cult of America- and Israel-hatred, and belief in "soft power." For a couple of years now, in a sort of division of labor, America has done most of the actual fighting in Iraq while Britain, France, and Germany "took on" Iran by trying to talk and bribe it out of its designs. Do not expect the abject failure of this exercise in "soft power," coupled with relatively small-scale eruptions of Islamist mayhem in Spain, Britain, and France, to jog Europe to the point that it would credibly threaten Iran, let alone act against it. Europe seems too far gone; a civilization that cannot sustain itself demographically seems unlikely to fight for what little of life it clings to.
(...)
That leaves the United States, far superior to either Europe or Israel in operational capability, and fortunately only partly infected with the self-negation virus. A sector of the American polity cannot, Europe-like, accept that it is at war and is more concerned with pillorying the president for wiretaps on terrorists four years ago than with imminent apocalyptic threats. The sane, strong America is again the world's main hope.
Or this, from the the Baltimore Sun earlier this month:
most of our Western allies have been sheltered from the brutal realities of the international jungle for more than half a century under the American nuclear umbrella.
People insulated from dangers for generations can indulge themselves in the illusion that there are no dangers - as much of Western Europe has. This is part of the "world opinion" that makes us hesitant to take any decisive action to prevent a nightmare scenario of nuclear weapons in the hands of hate-filled fanatics.
Do not look for Europe to support any decisive action against Iran. But look for much of their intelligentsia, and much of our own intelligentsia as well, to be alert for any opportunity to wax morally superior if we do act.
They will be able to think of all sorts of nicer alternatives to taking out Iran's nuclear development sites. They will be able to come up with all sorts of abstract arguments and moral equivalence, such as: Other countries have nuclear weapons. Why not Iran?
Debating abstract questions is much easier than confronting concrete and often brutal alternatives. The big question is whether we are serious or suicidal.
But now such talk is - again - seeping through into the editorial pages of serious newspapers, most recently, this week, in the Economist and in Le Monde (in French, but by a US professor, Amitai Etzioni, the inventor of "communautarianism").
my translation of Etzioni
The limits of the velvet glove
We'll have to use force. And if it is not feasible, Iran will become a full nuclear power. Either way, soft power will have shown its very low effectiveness in international relations. It will have proved that if hard power works better when preceded and accompanied by soft power, the converse is also true: soft power is a lot more effective when it can credibly be followed by hard power.
One can be less distrustful of legitimate international institutions, alliances and diplomacy than the Bush administration is, but the need for hard power in case of impasse is much bigger than Europeans will admit.
Iran is not the first example. Of the hundreds of resolutions by the UN, many have been totally ignored, becuase of the UN's lack of coercitive powers. (...)
Thus, the way Iran is roughing up the Europeans demonstrates that soft power is not enough: it must be supported by force. The time has come for Europeans to abandon their smugness and to recognize that they have to cooperate with the US if they want to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power
And the Economist (from which the picture above is taken):
Iran provides a test of both Europe's "soft power" and its relationship with hard power
soft power may have been effective at changing the behaviour of America, and possibly Russia and China. That is, it sustained itself as a policy and was not undermined by western squabbles. Yet the original purpose was, presumably, to change the behaviour of Iran, by drawing it into a gentle web of mutual rights and obligations. Is Iran changing? Nobody outside Iran knows. Diplomatic efforts are continuing. But the signs do not exactly look promising. "Thank God, our enemies are idiots," said one prominent Iranian cleric recently. Instead of thinking about a web of obligations, the Iranians are talking solely about their rights to have whatever nuclear technology they choose.
(...)
Does soft power support or supplant hard power? America backed the Europeans not just because it had no better idea what to do but because it thought European diplomacy might reinforce American bellicosity (and vice versa). To the Americans, there is merit in a good cop/bad cop approach to policing the world. Now that the good cop has suffered a setback, people are weighing their truncheons. John McCain, a Republican senator, has said that, bad as war would be, a nuclear-armed Iran would be worse.
But for true believers in soft power, the point is not to support but to supplant brute force. It is a better way of managing global tensions: a rival star, not a best supporting actor. To those who think like this, the talking can never stop. Some Europeans still say that military action is inconceivable and threats of sanctions are unhelpful. This seems a characteristic European cast of mind. Nothing is ever decided. The European project is never finished. And even if something seems to have been tried and failed, there is always a chance to try--and fail?--again.
The crisis with Iran has exposed rather than reconciled these transatlantic differences. They are likely to get sharper over the next few months. As Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment argues, both hard and soft power have their characteristic flaws. Hard-power advocates can be too quick to pull the trigger--as, arguably, in Iraq. But for soft-power believers, there is never a trigger to pull--as, possibly, in Iran.
Now, these recent articles are never unreasonable, or absurd on their face, but they push a number of "facts" that are flat out wrong:
- one is the fact that America was pushing for a "good cop/bad cop" routine vs Europe's go-it-alone good-cop-ism. This is false. It is Europe that has been pushing for a "good cop/bad cop" routine against America's go-it-alone bad-cop-ism. So Europe has never argued that diplomacy alone would work, quite the opposite, it has tried repeatedly to bring in the US to at least talk to the Iranians - in the full knowledge that any deal had to fly with the Americans, and that any failure to get a deal would bring back the military option. The military option has always been on the table in Washington, but not the diplomatic route;
- the other main lie is that this diplomacy has failed. To their credit, the Economist at least acknowledges all the positive things that have come out of the European efforts, including (i) pushing back an Iranian N-bomb by at least 2 years (ii) keeping Russia and China neutral or even, now, leaning West in the conflict, and (iii) ironically, from the hawks' perspective, making the eventual use of sanctions or force appear more legitimate and fair, and clearly caused by unreasonable behavior from the Iranians.
In addition, as the last line from the Economist above should remind everybody:
soft power may possibly fail with Iran, but hard power has irretrievably, hopelessly, and durably failed already in Iraq. That should remind us of a familiar modus operandi: blame the other side (here, Europeans) of the very sins you are guilty of yourself.
So yes, we seem to be in the middle of a typical, coordinated, comprehensive offensive by the neocons to once again blame the "traitors" (the Europeans this time, but of course they are supported by the cosseted intellectuals of the coast) for their own failures, and ante up on their disastrous - but macho and fearmongering and thus sellable - policies.
Let's just remember a few things to strike back at them, and remind everybody that, thanks to them, the "hard power" option is not available:
- the US Army is busy in Iraq, and is slowly being destroyed in the process. It is thus unavailable for action in Iran. An air campaign will not be sufficient to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons or programme, and will be (rightly) considered a war of aggression, with unpredictable, but unlikely to be pleasant, consequences;
- Iran de facto has a WMD already: oil. In the current context, they can play havoc on the markets by withholding part of their production (at 4mb/d, they are the fourth largest producer after Saudi Arabia, Russia and the USA, and produce more than the spare capacity of the world, optimistically estimated at at 1-2 mb/d) or worse, by preventing tanker traffic in the Straits of Hormuz. The West WILL be brought to its knees if Iran uses these cards - and as I wrote in earlier threads, this could easily trigger a nuclear retaliation by the USA, not a very desirable outcome;
- Iran has not yet breached its international obligations. It has behaved in highly ambiguous ways, and chosen dual technologies when it could have chosen civilan-use only technology to gain access to nuclear energy, and its president has recently engaged in highly inflammatory discourse, but that is not in breach of the treaties to which it is a signatory. It is also right to point the hypocrisy of the countries that try to limit what it has the right to do while countries like India, Pakistan and Israel, all far worse offenders in the nuclear arena, are left to their own devices.
- ultimately, the issue of Iran needs to be resolved in the USA. Iran has legitimate security concerns of its own (with 4 nuclear powers nearby, not all friendly, the US running two of its neighbors, with soldiers present in at least 2 more (Turkey, Azerbaijan) and a history of meddling in the country, and now Iraq falling apart, to name but the most obvious), and has understandably been asking the US for security guarantees. But the memory of the hostage crisis in 1979 seemingly prevents the USA from considering that country as anything but a target for wrath or revenge - and that's at the core of anything Iran does in return. A "peace treaty" between the two countries (necessarily including a recognition of Israel by Iran) is the only reasonable solution, and it will require diplomacy, not war.
All Europe could do was to avoid the worst - the use by either side of force, and that has been successful. Resolution of the crisis will come from peaceful talks between the USA and Iran. The issue is not that Europe is weak, it is that the Bush administration has been so pathetically bad at
diplomacy, and in Iraq, at war, thus making the "bad cop" bit of good diplomacy a joke.
Rooselvelt said it best "carry a big stick and speak softly", not "carry a big stick and use the big stick".
We must not listen to the warmongers, they will kill us all for their delusions. Diplomacy will be deemed to have failed when it has actually been tried - by Washington.