Why U.S. Diplomacy Will Fail With Iran

The Wall Street Journal

Long before his inauguration, Barack Obama lucidly explained how he would deal with Iran. During the campaign he said he would “engage” its leaders by offering talks without preconditions—without even asking them to stop chanting “death to America” when concluding their speeches.

His premise was that President George W. Bush’s policy had been incoherent and unsuccessful in stopping Tehran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Both charges are true. It was certainly illogical of Mr. Bush to denounce the Iranian regime as part of the “axis of evil” and then to seek its support in Afghanistan when forming the first, provisional Karzai government, and then again in Iraq to calm down the truculent preacher Moqtada al-Sadr and his violent Mahdi militia.

But Mr. Obama’s critique failed to acknowledge that Bush’s incoherence paid off. Iran helped consolidate the post-invasion governments created by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq, even while supplying weapons to whoever would attack Americans. (For example, it lobbied for U.S. candidate Hamid Karzai to become chairman of the governing committee when Afghan leaders gathered in Germany in Dec. 2001.)

Still, the Bush administration’s failure to stop Iran’s nuclear and missile programs stands out. Nothing worked—not the occasional muted threats of bombing the nuclear installations, nor the diplomacy delegated to the British, French and Germans. The “E-3” talks started very well with the Tehran Agreed Statement of Oct. 21, 2003—under which Iran temporarily promised to stop enriching uranium. They ended in ridicule in 2006 when chief negotiator Hassan Rowhani boasted that they’d kept the Europeans talking while building up their nuclear plants.

In retrospect, it is obvious why the E-3 negotiators seemed so successful in 2003. Iran’s leaders had just witnessed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the swift, almost effortless destruction of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Fearing they might be next, they stopped the nuclear weapons program they have always denied and the nuclear enrichment program they finally acknowledged in 2002—after its disclosure by dissidents.

Later, when Iran’s leaders saw the U.S. bogged down in Iraq and no longer feared a march on Tehran, they publicly resumed uranium enrichment, and also, no doubt, the secret weapons program as well. So Mr. Bush had failed, just as Mr. Obama said.

There was only one more step before “engagement” could begin: Mr. Obama’s June 4 Cairo speech in which he apologized for the August 1953 overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq. “In the middle of the Cold War,” he said, “the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.” The CIA was certainly involved, but the cringing was quite unnecessary. By August 1953 Mosaddeq had dismissed Iran’s parliament and was ruling undemocratically by personal decree. When angry mobs converged on his residence, he fled to a U.S. aid office next door trusting that the Americans would save his life. They did.

As it happened, Mr. Obama’s apology and his offer of unconditional talks backfired.

With Iran’s presidential selection of June 12 coming up, the all-powerful Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had his opportunity to replace the thoroughly unpresentable, loudly extremist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a more plausible negotiating partner for Mr. Obama. This strategy had been used before. In 1997, when the regime needed to calm unrest at home and mollify opinion abroad, it gave the presidency to the soft-spoken, elegantly robed, and supposedly liberalizing Mohammad Khatami. He was just the man to provide a moderate front for the clerical dictatorship. To be sure, by the time Mr. Khatami ended his presidency in 2005, everyone knew that he had not even tried to liberalize anything of substance. But by then he had served his purpose.

Evidently, Mr. Khamenei rejected the option of choosing a moderate. Instead he awarded Ahmadinejad a “divine” win with wildly improbable majorities—even in the home towns of his rivals.

Mr. Obama’s problem is that Mr. Khamenei could only have chosen Ahmadinejad because he does not want friendly talks with the U.S. He evidently calculates that without the ideology of “anti-Americanism” the regime would collapse. He is right.

Certainly religious support cannot be enough anymore. Too many high-ranking clerics, including Grand Ayatollahs Hosssein Ali Montazeri and Yusef Saanei, now publicly oppose the regime. Nor can Persian nationalism serve as the prop: Its chief target is the despised Arabs, which is problematic, as the regime keeps trying to be more Arab than the Arabs in its hostility to Israel. Yet this hostility is itself a problem internally because the regime’s generous funding of Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad is extremely unpopular in Iran. Only anti-Americanism is left, and Mr. Khamenei will not let Mr. Obama take it away.

Unless Iran’s politics change, Mr. Obama’s policy will fail. At that point, he will need a new, new policy of increasingly severe sanctions under the looming threat of bombardment—exactly Mr. Bush’s old policy. But as Iran’s nuclear program advances, time is running out for this policy to work.