McCain on Iran: Bush all over again

Iran's support of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group, is the chief reason it is labeled a state sponsor of terrorism, a categorization played up by McCain and other hard-liners. (The message intended for the American public is that Iran is, ultimately, supporting terrorist attacks against innocent Americans or Europeans.) Iran's support for Hezbollah is also a reason why the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's Qods force, the foreign expeditionary arm of the force, has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. Senate (in a resolution voted for by both McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton, and now, apparently, one supported by Obama as well).

But although Hezbollah has an active military wing, it is also a political party and is now part of the government of Lebanon -- a government the U.S. supports. The Bush administration has in the past refused to talk to Hezbollah. But without Hezbollah, the recent 18-month government deadlock, which left Lebanon perilously without a president for six of those months, would not have been resolved. The subsequent power-sharing deal gave Hezbollah a stake in the government, even if the U.S. is reluctant to recognize that. (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently engaged in talks with Hezbollah officials in Beirut.)

The reality is that Iran's influence in the Levant has grown, not diminished, because of our refusal to talk with either Hezbollah or its patron, Iran, and Hezbollah will not disappear from the Lebanese scene simply because we ignore it. If we want to increase our influence and check Iranian influence in the region, then we have to either talk to Iran and Hezbollah, and try to find a way to ally our interests with theirs (which would certainly have to include Hezbollah ceasing their attacks on Israel) -- or we have to bomb Iran and hope that bombing will make them rethink their support of Hezbollah.

Hamas, the militant Sunni political party that runs Gaza, is also unlikely to disappear through U.S. refusal to engage them. Iran is one of the only countries offering financial and material support to Hamas, a fact that has elevated Iran's prestige in the region and across the greater Muslim world while U.S. prestige has waned. Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, in recognition of the reality that ignoring Hamas has produced no favorable outcome, suggested recently that he would negotiate with Hamas in order to unite the Palestinians in their quest for a homeland. Even Israel, whose long-stated pre-condition of not talking to Hamas until it first recognized Israel's right to exist, finally came to the conclusion that it had to negotiate with Hamas or otherwise plunge much deeper into military conflict. With Israel's citizenry overwhelmingly in favor of talks, and with its military wary of the ramifications of a full assault on Gaza, Israel reached a cease-fire agreement with Hamas, announced on Tuesday.

The current Iranian president's ongoing "threats" against Israel represent perhaps the easiest of the issues to resolve by talks. President Ahmadinejad relishes the attention his contemptible outbursts bring, such as when he called Israel a "stinking corpse" during Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations in March, or when he again suggested Israel's demise in a recent speech commemorating Ayatollah Khomeini's death: "You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime which has 60 years of plundering, aggression and crimes in its file has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene."

McCain jumped at the opportunity to play up Ahmadinejad's rhetoric as indicative of a dire danger. "Foremost in all our minds is the threat posed by the regime in Tehran," he said in his speech to AIPAC in June. "The Iranian president has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' and suggested that Israel's Jewish population should return to Europe. He calls Israel a 'stinking corpse' that is 'on its way to annihilation'."

But while Ahmadinejad's bluster pays dividends for him in the Arab and Muslim street, and perhaps helps to distract the Iranian people from the painful economic problems that have compounded under his presidency, in reality it is no realistic reflection of Iranian foreign policy. Even if Ahmadinejad were really intent on waging war against Israel, he has no real power or authority to do so: He is not the commander in chief of Iran's military; the supreme leader is. If Iran ever were to build a nuclear weapon, it would not be its president's finger on the button, it would be its supreme leader's. Ayatollah Khamenei has made it clear that Iran will never attack another country first, and it is certainly in its interest not to do so. Every Iranian official, and all the clerics including the supreme leader, know full well that an attack on Israel will mean suicide for the regime (if not the country more widely) -- and the No. 1 priority, especially for the clerics, is to maintain the continuity of the regime.

Iranian rhetoric, prior to Ahmadinejad's presidency, has always been pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli (or anti-Zionist, as the Iranians claim) -- but even today, most Iranians do not view Ahmadinejad's excessively belligerent remarks as a direct threat to attack Israel. Ahmadinejad is up for reelection in 2009, but whether he is reelected or not, Iran's policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in particular is not likely to change. That policy -- reiterated to me by President Khatami in his last days in office in July 2005, repeated by officials in the Ahmadinejad administration and stated publicly by the supreme leader himself -- is that Iran will support whatever the Palestinian people decide for their fate. Iran could be brought in as a participant to talks on a Palestinian state, or it could agree, in talks with the U.S., to sit on the sidelines. If Mahmoud Abbas engages Hamas as he has suggested, and comes to an agreement with Hamas, then Iran will be at the table anyway, unless, of course, America is at war with Iran.

Ultimately, John McCain's position on Iran -- in lockstep with the Bush administration's -- is one of refusing, as he puts it, to "appease" the enemy. Shortly after President Bush's speech to the Israeli Knesset in May, in which Bush characterized potential negotiations with Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah as appeasement, McCain said to reporters in Ohio: "Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain." He continued: "I believe that it's not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn't sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.''

Bush, McCain and their hard-line Republican supporters have managed to redefine the word "appeasement" with this line of reasoning. Appeasement, as any student of history (or even anyone with a dictionary handy) knows, means to placate by acceding to demands, such as when Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, acceded to an invasion of Sudetenland in the hopes of placating Hitler. It is unclear what the U.S. would be acceding to if it were to engage in talks with Iran, a state that is relatively puny in military terms and in that regard is in no way comparable to Hitler's Germany.

What Iranian demands would the U.S. face, then? That they be allowed to enrich uranium for civilian energy purposes, a right they are granted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty? They're enriching now, and will continue to do so whether we talk with them or not.

The bottom line is that Iran is not, and never will be, a serious military threat to the United States, centrifuges spinning or not. Militarily, it is incapable of standing up to Israel (even if it were to develop a nuclear weapons capability, that capability would pale in comparison to Israel's), let alone the U.S. But not negotiating with Iran can only help strengthen its position, and weaken ours, in a vitally strategic region. Iran will continue to reap unprecedented income from its oil exports (oil that booming countries such as China cannot afford to embargo). It will continue to use its wealth and its standing in the Muslim world as a bulwark against American hegemony in the region. And it will continue to grow its power and influence.

At this late date, the U.S. faces a rather obvious, stark choice in the matter. Yes, Senator McCain, you could, as you joked last year, "bomb, bomb, Iran." Or you can talk, talk to Iran. It will have to be one or the other.