Can we agree to stop cozying up to Iran?

Two Democrats from the center-left Brookings Institution, Steven Pifer and Strobe Talbott, write that eight “former U.S. national security practitioners — the two of us, plus former U.S. representative to NATO Ivo Daalder, former undersecretary of defense Michèle Flournoy, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst, former deputy undersecretary of defense Jan Lodal, former NATO European commander James Stavridis and former U.S. European Command deputy commander Charles Wald –” are calling for a sharp reversal in U.S. policy on Ukraine. They call for:

First, the White House and Congress must commit serious money to Ukraine’s defense: $1 billion in military assistance this fiscal year, followed by an additional $1 billion each in fiscal year 2016 and 2017. Congress should not only authorize assistance, as it did in the Ukraine Freedom Support Act last year, but also appropriate funds.

Second, the U.S. government should alter its policy and begin providing lethal assistance to Ukraine. To be sure, most of the above funds would go to nonlethal assistance. For example, the Ukrainian army desperately needs counter-battery radars to pinpoint the source of enemy rocket and artillery fire, which cause about 70 percent of Ukrainian casualties.

But the Ukrainians also need some defensive arms, particularly light anti-armor weapons. The antitank missiles in the Ukrainian inventory are more than 20 years old, and a large proportion of them do not work. U.S. anti-armor weapons could fill a crucial gap.

Third, the U.S. government should approach other NATO member states about assisting Ukraine, particularly those countries that operate former Soviet equipment and weapons systems compatible with Ukraine’s hardware.

This is one instance in which the president’s policy is so abjectly wrong that even Democrats cannot support him. This is not the only one.

The president’s multiple failures in the Middle East are largely attributable to a hugely dangerous notion: that we can reverse historic alliances with Sunni monarchs and Israel to reach a sort of detente with Iran. This noxious idea is permeating many separate actions, all disastrous: serial concessions to Iran in nuclear arms talks; refusal to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as the bloody civil war dragged on and jihadists intervened; turning a deaf ear on the Green Revolution; our attempt to broker a deal to end the Gaza war on terms more favorable to Hamas (the Qatar plan) than one the Palestinian Authority, Israel and Egypt all favored; refusal to confront Iran on state-sponsored terrorism and arms transfers; ignoring Hezbollah’s ongoing violations of the U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701; allying ourselves with Iran-backed rebels in Yemen and the overt hostility toward Israel. The notion that we could abandon our allies, cozy up to Iran — whose ambitions and values are antithetical to our own — and bet on a radical Islamic country’s desire for normalized relations with the West is absurd and is wreaking havoc in the region. “Obama doesn’t see us at war with radical Islam partly because he’s taken sides among elements,” says Michael Makovsky of the pro-Israel group JINSA. “He’s sympathetic to Shia radicals in Iran and its proxies and allies in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and has been sympathetic to (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Gaza and Turkey, but he opposes Sunni radicals al-Qaeda and Islamic State.” He warns: “His most consistent regional policy seems to be realignment toward our traditional enemy Iran and against our traditional regional allied states–Israel and Sunni Arabs. This is his biggest and most dangerous failing, as the strengthening regional power of Iran and its growing nuclear potential represent the preeminent and immediate strategic threat to U.S. interests.”

Here, then, is the next project for a large bipartisan array of lawmakers and experts: Reject accommodation with Iran. Explain the threat the regime poses to the West. Recommend we reestablish close and cooperative relations with traditional allies. Increase pressure on Iran, not only by sanctions but also by reversing the actions listed above. Former Obama adviser Dennis Ross took a stab at this last fall when he wrote that Sunni and Shia radicals are engaged in a fundamental struggle with non-Islamists to control the region and that we must side unequivocally with the latter. He warns that we should not reach out to the Islamists whose “creed is not compatible with pluralism or democracy.” He reiterated this on “Fox News Sunday.” He warned that “you look at that map and you see Iran being on the move, you see radical Islamism as reflected by Iran fighting radical Islamism as reflected, I would say, ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood.” He argued: “”We have to decide, radical Islam, whether it’s Sunni or Shia, is the enemy. And we have to then begin to work with those who see that as a threat to them. We shouldn’t be reluctant to call it ‘Islamic radicalism,’ precisely because there are those in the Middle East who see it as a threat and they’re the ones who ultimately have to discredit it.”

The players are new, but the dynamic is familiar. In 1979, a sage Democrat wrote:

Since many traditional autocracies permit limited contestation and participation, it is not impossible that U.S. policy could effectively encourage this process of liberalization and democratization, provided that the effort is not made at a time when the incumbent government is fighting for its life against violent adversaries, and that proposed reforms are aimed at producing gradual change rather than perfect democracy overnight. To accomplish this, policymakers are needed who understand how actual democracies have actually come into being. History is a better guide than good intentions.

A realistic policy which aims at protecting our own interest and assisting the capacities for self-determination of less developed nations will need to face the unpleasant fact that, if victorious, violent insurgency headed by . . . revolutionaries is unlikely to lead to anything but totalitarian tyranny.

The Democrat was Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, and the problem then was revolutionary Marxism. But her assessment (“Dictatorships & Double Standards”) has much to teach us. Both Kirkpatrick and Ross urged that an alliance with less-than-perfect regimes does not mean we stop pressing for democracy, pluralism and the rule of law. It does, however, require that we understand who our real enemies are and the mortal threat to Western civilization that they pose.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/02/02/can-we-agree-to-stop-cozying-up-to-iran/