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I went to the Nick Burns Iran talk at Brookings. Here are some provisional thoughts on it, and I apologize in advance for any errors. It's a complex policy with different levels and it is consciously being communicated to different audiences -- the American public, Congress, the Washington foreign policy elite, the Iranian government, other foreign governments -- all at the same time. One headline of the talk I expect the Iranian government heard was something that Burns didn't say - which you would have expected him to say, and which the administration has been repeating like a mantra since last spring: "suspend uranium enrichment." At the end, he was asked to clarify, what would it take for the US to sit down with Iran, and his answer would suggest that the US has quietly reduced what it demands Iran do before it would join multilateral talks with it -- suspend uranium enrichment for the duration of negotations in exchange for suspension of international sanctions cobbled together under a Chapter VII UN Security Council resolution passed in December. "Suspension for suspension," Burns said at the end. That would seem to be a sweetening of the deal. He also emphasized that there is a lot more time for diplomacy, and that the P5+Germany offer from last June that would have the internationals help build a civilian nuclear power facility for the Iranians taking the enriched materials off shore is still on the table and they'd like Iran to say yes. In other words, one interpretation of this all (Iran Powerpoint, Bush's Iran comments at his news conference today, Bush's January 10th comments about Iran in his surge speech, Burns today, etc., and that's just the rhetorical part...) is that it's intended to work as coercive diplomacy, as a similar approach has on North Korea, to get Iran to change its behavior, on two fronts, both nuclear and stepping back from its alleged regional destabilization activities. Or else: another UN Security Council resolution after elBaradei is expected to report to the Security Council next week that Iran is not in compliance, getting more countries, banks, investors on board to economically isolate Iran, add more names on the travel ban list, more Iranians scooped up in Iraq, etc. etc., with an exit ramp available for a while, before the prospect of use of that naval air power amassing in the region.
And yet, one can't discount the administration's recent seeming, coordinated effort to deliberately publicly overplay Iran's bad-acting in Iraq as a chief factor for violence there, contrary to the judgment of the recently released NIE on Iraq. It's a concern especially as elements of the administration seem to be making a case to the American public that Iran is more of a factor in Iraq violence than it actually is, and on the administration's specific claim that Iran is in effect killing US soldiers. Construing this as a force protection argument as the administration is doing would conceivably be an effort by the administration to give itself lots of legal wiggle room in terms of authorizing action that would not require Congressional approval....(by their legal construction)....On force protection grounds, you could do a whole lot that you couldn't do on other grounds, especially without Congressional approval. That the administration is making this specific argument about Iran in Iraq is important and shouldn't be overlooked.
So what about the force protection argument? Setting aside for the moment the question of Iranian government agency or lack of compelling evidence of Iranian government agency ... As I noted the other day, at face value, the Pentagon estimate that 170 coalition deaths are due to Iranian-originated materiel would mean that about 5% of the estimated 3,400 coalition deaths in Iraq -- a small fraction -- is due to Iranian-made stuff. I am not sure how many coalition forces deaths are due to vehicular accidents, but I would guess it's not so far off that number, maybe a bit more. Objectively speaking, there would seem to be a genuinely propagandistic quality to the administration campaign to imply without saying directly that Iran is causing say a third or half of the deaths of coalition forces in Iraq, which an observer might detect it has been trying to imply. (That recent internal government estimates may have determined a different trend line within the near term is another factor here). But stepping back, the seemingly disingenuous element to that PR campaign would seem to undercut the credibility of administration officials such as Burns who participates in it when they make the case therefore that this all is about aggressive multilateral diplomacy. If they are self-consciously misleading on point A, are they also misleading on point B -- that this is not leading to war? That's the element of doubt they seem to leave in their multiple audiences' minds, and perhaps deliberately so.