Go read Kevin Drum on whether the lack of success to date resulting from the Bush administration approaches to dealing with North Korea's and Iran's nuclear programs will make conservatives reconsider the merits of pursuing bilateral negotiations. In it he highlights this piece by Juan Cole asking whether Iran will get a nuclear bomb that is getting some attention. Cole posits Iran will and there is not much effective that anyone can do to stop them. I know far less than the experts on all these issues, but I posit that the US will try to do something about it, and what's more, that a Kerry administration would have had its hand forced to do so as well.

If I had to put money on it, this is where I think things are headed -- events driven by Iran to a surprising degree. And keep in mind, I don't have the slightest regional expertise that should make anyone listen to me. I have spent the better part of a year, however, interviewing and listening to members of the Washington Iran policy community, and absorbing aspects of the debate. This is a rough-drawn sketch of the take-away. It's not what I advocate or not, just where I see things headed. I apologize to any experts on these issues who might be reading given indigestion by this decidedly non-expert-journalist's take.

The Bush administration really has no Iran policy. Riven with internal divisions over how to proceed with Iran and preoccupied with Iraq, it is completing an interagency policy review and is soon reaching the point of making some hard decisions. It seems first-off, that the US will give the European troika a deadline after which it will declare that their negotiations with Tehran over abandoning uranium enrichment and signing the NPT "additional protocols" have failed. There will then be a US-led effort to get Iran referred in noncompliance with the NPT to the UN Security Council; but an effective international sanctions regime will not materialize, in some part because of opposition from Russia and China, but not only them, and in large part because soaring oil prices make an oil embargo highly unlikely. As the Iran nuclear issue is kicked around and likely stalls at the UN, there is likely to be a half-hearted US/Congressional effort to support financially a Ukraine-style Iranian people power revolution against the Tehran regime. Perhaps covert elements of someone's plan involve encouraging ethnic unrest on Iran's borders, etc. in the hope of destabilizing the Tehran regime. But most of the people I talk to believe such efforts are unlikely to gain traction or move fast enough to preempt the prospect of the current Tehran regime from getting the bomb. So in the end, I believe it is likely that the Bush administration will face a choice before it leaves office on whether to conduct air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, possibly in tandem with a couple close allies. And I believe the administration will be under very strong pressure from internal elements and US domestic constituencies to preempt Iran getting a nuclear bomb. This is the option no one wants, and yet they don't-want-it less than they want to be seen to allow Iran to get a bomb.

(Interestingly, I also think had Kerry won, the path might not have been that different, after a detour through negotiations. Indeed, I think Kerry would have been under even more pressure than Bush to act decisively to preempt Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because of the perception that he and the Democrats are reluctant to use force. Kerry's team proposed testing Iran's intentions by offering to do a Clinton-North Korea style providing and removing of nuclear fuel, to see if Iran was really pursuing its nuclear program for peaceful purposes as it insists. Perhaps that would have worked, but I doubt it. As Fred Kaplan points out in this Slate piece, it's hard to believe (but not unfathomable, remember the miscalculations on Iraq's WMD after all) such an oil and gas rich country as Iran really is devoting such vast economic resources to pursue a nuclear program for energy purposes. I suppose we could be proved wrong. Ultimately, I believe Iran's intentions are not to have a nuclear program just for energy purposes, but that it wants a bomb.).

What could change this scenario? As far as I can tell, three things: Iranians succeed in changing their regime before it is perceived Iran is very close to getting the bomb (this would be a wonderful thing, but it doesn't seem likely to happen in a speedy time frame; a key strand of vocal neoconservative Iran hawks disagrees on this point); Iran is able to be persuaded off its current course, perhaps by some feat of an effective international sanctions regime being imposed (say, there's a 20% chance of this, maybe less); and thirdly, what I'll just call a surprise. Say, war in the Korean peninsula, or something that so drains remaining US crisis management abilities, that the US chooses to continue to kick this can down the road even further (possible, say 30%).

A lot of experts who know far more about these issues wouldn't seem to agree with my analysis or my predictions. Among them, Patrick Clawson and Henry Sokolski have written articles and a book suggesting there are a lot of options between the current European led negotiations and air strikes worth pursuing. Some of their proposals, described here, recommend measures to build an international coalition to isolate Iran and get diplomatic leverage, if not with Iran, then at least, with other countries on coming round to the US approach.

I guess the surprising thing to me about my take is that, it is so inconceivable to me that the Bush administration would choose at this point to engage in bilateral negotiations with Iran, that I wonder if Iran is too far gone to be deterrable diplomatically at this point at all. At this point, it seems too determined to get a bomb. Where US hardliners and I might have disagreed is on whether it was worth it to at least try, to make going down the limited list of higher risk and higher cost options truly a last resort.

Sunday Update: Belgravia Dispatch has elicited some interesting comments to these Iran musings, here. The always-cogent Praktike suggests we topple the mullahs with connectivity. And it occurred to me that I forgot to include in the above what about just buying off the mullahs, a la, a few bland "BP" looking folks landing in Tehran with bags of money, or more likely, Swiss bank account numbers ... All of the above suggests a kind of -- well, creativity -- that doesn't seem to flow in huge supplies in the second iteration of the Bush administration. Meantime, I see at Praktike's site the regime change meme has spread to perception of the Bush administration's policy options for Syria.

Posted by Laura at May 7, 2005 04:36 PM