Amb. Mark Palmer and his former boss Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz have drafted what strikes me as an eminently sensible position paper on US policy to Iran, for the Committee on the Present Danger [.pdf document linked]. I'm told some members of the resurrected CPD threatened to resign over an earlier draft of it. In the latest version released by the CPD today, the authors propose that the US move to engage the Iranian people with stepped up cultural, professional and academic exchanges, an offer to reopen the US embassy in Tehran (something not likely to be embraced by the theocratic rulers), while working to isolate the regime, by, for instance, targeted economic sanctions and enacting travel bans on members of the regime. Much of this will be familiar to those who followed US policy to Milosevic's Serbia in the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration worked successfully to isolate and sanction the members of the regime, while stepping up support to the democratic opposition, human rights organizations, student groups, opposition-controlled towns, etc. Among the Iran paper's recommendations:

Offer to reopen our embassy in Tehran;

Step up cultural, academic and professional exchanges;

Authorize American non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to operate within Iran;

Arrange for young Iranian activists to attend civic campaign seminars in the U.S. and elsewhere;

Engage in interaction between such agencies as the CIA, FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency with Iranian counterparts on issues such as drugs and terrorism;

Build a legal case against Khamenei and his associates for their financing of terrorists and human rights violations in order to build pressure for them to "return to the mosque" or face a possible international tribunal;

Use "smart" sanctions to target assets of Khamenei and his associates; and

Provide up to $10 million a year to fund independent satellite television stations now broadcasting from the U.S. to Iran.

I have a lot of respect for the paper's primary author, Mark Palmer, the vice chair of the board of Freedom House, and a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, who is genuinely one of the leading pro-democracy activists and thinkers working this issue. His ideas are described in his book, Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's last Dictators by 2025, and can be seen at work in places like Ukraine.

Update: I'm told the phone number on the CPD Iran paper press release belongs to APCO International, the lobbying firm affiliated with Peter Hannaford, among others. It's still curious: which is APCO's client that pushed for the re-creation of CPD? Here's some background.

More: Here's Eli Lake's take on the new Iran paper. He seemed to pick up on the Serbia "smart sanctions" precedent too.

Posted by Laura at December 20, 2004 03:57 PM