Iran might be many things, but it is not the Soviet Union

Aaron Ellis 9.30am

Some of the worst decisions in history have been influenced by bad historical analogies. In an essay on the part played by such analogies in American foreign policy, Robert Dallek dubbed their malign influence “the tyranny of metaphor”.

“For all their pretensions to shaping history, U.S. presidents are more often its prisoners.”

The tyranny of metaphor is especially strong in this perennial debate over the Iran Problem. Those who want to attack the country often justify their position by comparing its regime to the Nazis.

One commentator noted recently:

“No other historical episode gets mentioned as often by pundits and policy makers in arguing that some menace or supposed menace needs to be confronted firmly. What is drawn from the Nazi analogy is an adage that a threat must be stopped forcefully now to avoid a bigger and costlier fight later.”

The comparison is ridiculous for any number of reasons, but it serves an important purpose: it is an easy-to-grasp analogy that helps coax those unsure about the use of force.

Yesterday in the House of Commons, in an urgent question to William Hague (video), Robert Halfon boldly described Iran as “the new Soviet Union of the Middle East”. Though his subsequent description of Iranian behaviour did not explain the comparison, there are two ways one can interpret it.

A generous interpretation would be that Mr Halfon believes the regime in Tehran is so crooked, contradictory, and such an aberration of Persian history that its eventual collapse is inevitable. It was this prophetic insight about Communism that led to George F Kennan devising the idea of containment, which won the Cold War. If we just applied continuous but restrained pressure, the Soviet regime would either yield to the West or be overthrown by the Russians and other subjected populations themselves. Going to war with the Soviet Union would not only be disastrous, but also unnecessary.

The more likely interpretation is that Mr Halfon genuinely believes that Iran poses the same degree of threat as the Soviet Union did, which is as absurd as thinking it poses the same threat as Nazi Germany.

Both Israel and the United States dwarf Iran militarily, whereas the Soviet Union’s conventional forces dwarfed those of the West years before the Russians successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949.

Iran has only one friend in the Middle East - Syria - and it is unlikely that friendship will continue if the Assad regime falls. Until the final years of the Cold War, Moscow had almost all of Eastern Europe under its thumb and, until the 1960s, the important support of Mao’s China.

If Iran is like the Soviet Union in any way, it is the Soviet Union of 1991, a basket case. The influential commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote earlier this month:

“The real story on the ground is that Iran is weak and getting weaker. Sanctions have pushed the economy into a nose-dive. The political system is fractured and fragmenting.”

I wrote yesterday that the only way we can come to an informed decision about Iran is by raising the standard of the debate. Nik also wrote that a debate of such direct import must take place in the House of Commons before any substantive military move. Thankfully, Parliament was granted a preliminary murmur later yesterday afternoon.

Those who claim to have a solution to the problems posed by Tehran and its nuclear programme should furnish us with a coherent strategy, as well as explaining how to offset the trade-offs and indirect consequences of their preferred policies.

And yesterday highlighted another problem, which perhaps we shall never escape: the use and abuse of history.

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When will Parliament have its proper say about Iran?

Nik Darlington 12.20pm

Last November, the Foreign Secretary, William Hague refused to rule out military action against Iran. Ten days ago, William Hague again refused to rule out military action against Iran. And today, the Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, has signalled a reinforcement of Britain’s military presence in the Gulf - in particular around the strategically important Straits of Hormuz. HMS Argyll already set sail to join US forces at the weekend.

Aaron has an excellent article on the blog this morning, which I strongly encourage you to read. In it, he criticises the blindly relentless march towards war from some quarters, and ineffective sanctions from others. The situation in Iran, always bubbling beneath the surface of the 24/7 news cycle, is escalating terrifyingly fast.

If Britain is genuinely set to commit more troops to the region, out of a combined forces that are already under pressure from the ongoing insurgency in Afghanistan, the recent Libyan campaign and the heightened rhetoric surrounding the Falklands, then Parliament must have a say. The case for threats of force towards has not convincingly been made.

Supposing we do reinforce the area through which we receive approximately one-fifth of our oil and more than four-fifths of our LNG, what is the plan? Who, aside from the United States - and predictably enough, Israel - is on our side? China? Russia? The UN? What about the Arab League, so crucial to the Libyan sorties?

These are the questions the Defence Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and, eventually, the Prime Minister needs to stand up in Parliament and answer. And they need to do it soon.

How do you solve a problem like Iran?

Aaron Ellis 9.58am

This question dominates the news once a year and every politician, pundit, and foreign policy expert has an answer to it. Helpfully, they reduce their answers to a single phrase around the likes of “sanctions” or “war”. Then something else happens in the world and Iran and its nuclear programme fade from the headlines until next year.

And every year these solutions contain the same flaw: they are not part of an overarching strategy.

They are tactics. Those who push them never fully explain how they will solve this Iran Problem.

A few Iranian officials threatened to close the Straits of Hormuz last month if further sanctions were imposed on the country. So began the perennial debate. Should the West attack Iran or negotiate harder? Perhaps apply even more sanctions? The recent murder of an Iranian nuclear scientist (for which Iran has pointed a finger at Israel and the UN) led to op-eds advocating targeted killings as the best solution to the Iran Problem.

As with previous debates, few of those pushing these ‘tactical’ policies put them in the context of a wider strategy to dissuade Tehran from acquiring a nuclear capability. Few of them touched on the trade-offs and unintended consequences of their preferred one-phrase-solutions. We cannot come to an informed decision on what to do about Iran if the solutions are so underdeveloped.

The most underdeveloped is the call for war. It is not clear how military action would change the Iranian regime’s view that a nuclear capability is essential to both its own security and that of the country. Those who push for an attack never offer a strategy that connects an airstrike against an Iranian nuclear facility with Tehran giving up a decades-old ambition. The assumption seems to be that if we blow stuff up then good things will happen.

The Iran debate is a spectrum: “negotiation” sits at the opposite end to “war”. But negotiation has its flaws too. If the Iranian regime believes that a nuclear capability is essential to its security and the West believes that this is unacceptable, then towards what are we negotiating?

“Negotiation” as a solution to the Iran Problem also has trade-offs that some are not prepared to make. One can argue that just as an attack on Iran would legitimise the regime, so could negotiations, as was the case with détente during the Cold War. The Israelis are particularly susceptible to this view, writes nuclear policy expert Mark Hibbs:

“At a time when Israel is bracing for a coming wave of democratic anti-Israeli sentiment from its newly-freed Arab neighbors, Israel will want to invest in a future Iran which, as in the past, was willing to live with Israel in peace. [That] would imply that Israel wouldn’t be interested in a negotiated solution to the nuclear crisis that would legitimate Iran’s current rulers.”

In the middle of the spectrum is the vaguer term “containment”, or applying restrained but continuous pressure against the regime until it yields to Western demands or is overthrown by the Iranian people. The great George F. Kennan devised the idea of containment as a way of avoiding the extremes of war with the Russians and appeasing them, and many think that this is the best approach vis-à-vis Iran.

Both sanctions, of which the EU has just unveiled another collection, and targeted killing come under the rubric “containment”, but they both have just as many trade-offs and indirect consequences as the extremes of the debate. These are rarely touched on by those who advocate them.

Though sanctions are seen by many as an alternative to war, they could lead to it if our application of them is not more discriminating. The respected Iran scholar Gary Sick has warned that if the West completely shuts off the regime’s oil revenues, they will lose the incentive to keep open the Straits of Hormuz. One-fifth of the world’s exported oil production traverses this important waterway per day, as does 85% of the UK’s imported LNG (liquefied natural gas). Any attempt by Tehran to close it “would drive up the price of oil to unforeseeable levels and risk a wider regional war.”

The current debate was given further legs by the death of Iranian scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan on 11th January. Mr Roshan, who worked at the Natanz nuclear facility, was killed when a magnetic bomb was attached to his car by a mysterious man on a motorcycle. Is targeted killing really the answer, as some op-eds advocated?

As with the one-phrase-solutions discussed above, “targeted killing” has unpleasant trade-offs and indirect consequences. Murders like that of Roshan are acts of terrorism: if countries like the United States and the United Kingdom were to make them policy then how our governments talk about terrorism would need to change. Instead of it being “barbaric”, terrorism would become a tool of statecraft. I like to think of myself as a realist, but one has to accept that foreign policy just isn’t made like this in a democracy.

So how do we solve a problem like Iran? The short answer is that nobody truly knows. President Obama commented in an interview recently that “this isn’t an easy problem, and anybody who claims otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

But if we are to find the right solution to the Iran Problem, then the standard of the debate needs to rise considerably.

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