Resetting Iran in US Policy

Robert J. Pranger

Mediterranean Quarterly, Volume 20, Number 4, Fall 2009, pp.

10-21 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/med/summary/v020/20.4.pranger.html

Access Provided by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam at 05/02/11 3:38PM GMT

 Resetting Iran in US Policy

Robert J. Pranger

The idea of “resetting” various areas of American foreign policy seems to

have received considerable attention in the Obama administration. For exam-
ple, Vice President Joe Biden seeks to reset Balkan policy, and the president
himself has declared that US policy toward the Islamic world should follow
the same path. A similar approach has been consistently advocated for Amer-
ica’s relations with Iran, and it is to this issue that my essay is directed.
Rhetoric aside, at the base of any area of change lies the obvious question
of substance. In Iran’s case, the past can never simply be wished away and,
I argue, it is precisely the past that, paradoxically, may provide promising
avenues for successfully resetting the future. Regrettably, at times the Obama
administration has coupled its idea of resetting with turning “new pages”
in our history books instead of also looking at a range of options that may
include “old pages” in our relations with Iran.
My thesis is that our current troubles with Tehran have, at least in part,
resulted from our straying from first principles — the origins of our national
interests in one of the Middle East’s largest nations. Let us look at these
fundamentals — where the United States began its relations with Iran — and
then examine how, and why, we have jointly complicated this relationship to
the point where today it is increasingly unmanageable in both Washington
and Tehran. Neither side seems able to develop a diplomacy that has enough
capacity to deal with certain problems that now bedevil diplomats, thus mov-
ing the two nations closer and closer to war in spite of the best intentions of
one or both sides to ease tensions and find avenues for détente. A relationship

Robert J. Pranger is a private consultant with extensive experience in national security affairs. He
was formerly associate/managing editor of Mediterranean Quarterly.

Mediterranean Quarterly 20:4  DOI 10.1215/10474552-2009-021

Copyright 2009 by Mediterranean Affairs, Inc.
 Pranger: Resetting Iran in US Policy   11

that began in the quest for better financial administration has undergone a
transformation one century later into urgent questions about Israel’s security,
a remarkable course of history where the clock must, at all costs, be turned
backward in time instead of forward into the unknown.

To this day it seems a pity that the United States did not hold onto its third-
power image in a Middle East awash with European imperial rivalries at
the turn of the twentieth century. Machinations of the British and Russians
dominated and finally destroyed Iran’s constitutional revolution of 1906 – 11.
Americans were but bit players in the single personage of Morgan Shuster,
an American financial expert engaged by the Persian government in 1911
to restore some order and fiscal stability. Shuster was quickly sabotaged by
Russia and compelled to leave the Iranians to their embroilment with Great
Britain, Russia, and Germany, with the first two powers finally finding com-
mon cause against Berlin in a prelude to the First World War. Two missions
to Iran by another American, Arthur Chester Millspaugh in 1922 – 7 and
1942, also designed to reform public administration and ensure the govern-
ment a steady income, met with fates similar to Shuster’s at the hands of the
British and Russians, the latter now transformed, in name only, into Soviets.
By the Second World War, London and Moscow appeared as putative allies
of Washington, but old imperial habits persisted. In the interwar period,
writes George Lenczowski, “Iran treated the United States primarily as a
friendly ‘third power’ which should be brought gradually to this part of the
world.”1
American efforts at entering the oil-production market in Iran before the
Second World War fared no better at the hands of the British and Russians/
Soviets than did Shuster and Millspaugh. In 1921 the Iranian parliament,
or Majlis, awarded a concession in the north to Standard Oil for fifty years
after negotiations conducted by none other than Shuster but opposed by the
British and their all-powerful Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and by the

1. George Lenczowski, Russia and the West in Iran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1949),
271.
12   Mediterranean Quarterly: Fall 2009

Soviets. The US government entered into this dispute on behalf of Standard

Oil but to no avail: the agreement never went into effect because of Soviet
opposition. In 1923 America’s Sinclair Oil, actually on good terms then with
the Soviets, was awarded a concession in northern Iran, but Sinclair sub-
sequently had a falling out with Moscow over exploration in the USSR and
pulled out of Iran in 1924 after the suspicious murder of America’s vice con-
sul in Tehran. In 1937 – 8 an American attempt at an oil concession under
Reza Shah ended in failure. It was not until after the oil crisis of 1951 – 3
under Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and his nationalization
of the AIOC, that US oil companies finally entered into a 1954 consortium
headed by their nemesis, this same British AIOC, now restored to its former
status after a successful coup against Mossadegh engineered by the Central
Intelligence Agency. By then, however, nationalization of oil under a friend-
lier Reza Shah Pahlavi had become a foregone conclusion.
It was the Second World War’s military exigencies in the fight against fas-
cism, and not oil, that brought the United States into Iran as more than a third
power, now in alliance with its former rivals in the Iranian economy, the Brit-
ish and Soviets. With the November 1943 Tehran Conference of these three
powers, the status of the American legation in Iran was raised to the level of
an embassy. And in the space of only two years the Cold War officially began
first in the controversial Soviet occupation of northern Iran. Rather than con-
tinuing at least some semblance of third-power status, the United States had
moved by the early 1950s into an imperial power of unprecedented influence
in Tehran. It was only in the 1978 – 9 Iranian revolution that Washington
would fall from grace among Iranians, although to this day it fancies its sta-
tus of “the Great Satan” as a sign of its central importance to an Iranian
future, now in thrall in a surrealistic way to Israel’s nuclear capability.
This odyssey of the United States in Iran from third power to Great Satan
under an Israeli nuclear threat has no parallel in American foreign policy.
It indicates, perhaps, a structural weakness in US diplomacy that does not
take seriously its legally mandated parity with its military and intelligence
counterparts. At every critical juncture in America’s relations with Iran since
the end of the Second World War, American diplomats have not been major
players in these relations.
In the Mossadegh crisis, the CIA was in command. The Dulles brothers,
 Pranger: Resetting Iran in US Policy   13

John Foster and Allen, agreed on this, with the State Department abdicating
its responsibilities in favor of adventurous — even glamorous — espionage.
During the White Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and Iran’s lavish
spending on military hardware in this same period, the shah was effectively
in charge of American foreign policy. In a 1970 meeting between His Maj-
esty, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird, and myself at Blair House, the
secretary argued that there seemed no compelling military rationale for an
Iranian purchase of the new, ultra-expensive F-14 Grumman Tomcat fighter,
destined for the US Navy. And Laird also pointed to pressing issues of Iran’s
economic development (Tehran University was at the time the scene of stu-
dent demonstrations to this effect). His Majesty looked coldly and imperiously
at us and replied simply, “I will have my Tomcats.” And, indeed, President
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger so ordered.
The Iranian revolution of 1978 – 9 and the prolonged crisis at the US
Embassy in Tehran actually produced a metaphor for our impotent diplomacy
as our diplomats were held “hostage” by a band of students; events were now
in charge of American policy. Those unfortunate Americans were finally
released through the strength of Algerian, not US, diplomacy.
And finally, in the debacle of Iran’s presidential election during June 2009,
and with the complete absence of American diplomats in Tehran for some
thirty years, we now learn, at least as the RAND Corporation sees it, that
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has gained ascendancy over our policy as well as
their country’s, in support of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.2 It
is this same organization that controls Iran’s nuclear program and, together
with Israel’s defense ministry, seems destined to determine the fate of the
human race.
At this point, we and our allies seem powerless to shape this catastrophic
course of events in Iran, a testimony to US foreign policy failure that extends
back to the Iranian oil crisis of the early 1950s. Both political parties have
been implicated in this disaster, a kind of bipartisan magical kingdom ruled
by autocracy and theocracy shamelessly betraying the aspirations of the cos-
mopolitan citizenry of the Middle East’s third largest nation, “a people inter-

2. “Stifling Dissent, Hard-Line Force Extends Control of Iran’s Society,” New York Times, 20 July
2009, A1.
14   Mediterranean Quarterly: Fall 2009

rupted” since the constitutional revolution of 1906 – 11.3 At least during that

revolution the third-power Americans, personified in Morgan Shuster, were
on the right side of history. It is tempting to turn the clock back to where this
all began for the United States in Iran, in spirit if not literally. To this pos-
sibility I now turn.

II

To search for new beginnings in policy toward Iran one must first clear away
the nuclear issue and Israel’s centrality in this problem. As noted earlier,
America’s relations with Iran date back to well before Israel’s declaration of
its statehood in 1948. Until the Islamic revolution, Israel was not an issue
in US-Iranian relations, quite the contrary. Even as late as the Iran-Contra
affair in the mid-1980s there existed important ties between Jerusalem and
Tehran in the context of the Iran-Iraq war. As a matter of fact, the awful
reality of the Holocaust was not a subject for political exploitation by Iran’s
leadership until the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in 2005.
It was at about this same time that Iran’s nuclear program became a mat-
ter of serious national security interest to the United States and its allies,
although this matter had received international attention earlier. It is also
obvious that Iran’s extreme assertiveness against Israel and Jews more gener-
ally under Ahmadinejad, previously latent in the ambitious “export model” of
the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary ideology,4 coincided with Iran’s grow-
ing strength in Iraq during the American invasion and occupation — Tehran
the obvious, if unintended, chief beneficiary of regime change in Baghdad.
And Iran’s flouting of its growing nuclear prowess for uses in both peace and
war can also be traced to the same emerging realization that it has claim to a
certain hegemonic status in Middle Eastern affairs, courtesy of neoconserva-
tive empire-building.

3. See the very provocative analysis by Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University, Iran: A People
Interrupted (New York: New Press, 2007).
4. On this ideology, see Roger Savory, “Ex Oriente Nebula: An Enquiry into the Nature of Khomei-
ni’s Ideology,” in Ideology and Power in the Middle East: Studies in Honor of George Lenczowski,
ed. Peter J. Chelkowski and Robert J. Pranger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988),
351 – 4.
 Pranger: Resetting Iran in US Policy   15

As I noted in a 2003 article in Mediterranean Quarterly, “As the smoke

of the Iraq war clears and Saddam’s regime has evaporated . . . the United
States will still be facing the Iraq problem, a generic weakness in contem-
porary international relations: the building of hegemonic power by nations
of medium status on the cheap through weapons of mass destruction.” 5
Although no such weapons were ever discovered in Iraq, Sad­dam’s hoax was
designed to give him hegemonic leverage in the Middle East.
In Iran’s case, no doubt exists about its capacity for developing weapons
of mass destruction. The same applies to Israel, where its cryptic pledge not
to be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the region may itself be an
ambiguous promise to do so. Such behavior is not confined to the Middle East,
as the case of North Korea makes clear. The concern about Iran’s nuclear
program must be cleared from the deck first, if we are ever to move back the
clock to a less dangerous American relationship with Iran. But how?
One approach to the increasing danger of nuclear proliferation comes from
a recent independent task force report published by the Council on Foreign
Relations.6 Emphasis in the task force recommendations is placed on con-
trol of weapons and the materials used to make them, many of these steps
technical in nature. The report also pushes strongly for an international con-
ference to strengthen nonproliferation with various steps at the upcoming
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2010. As usual in
New York- and Washington-based studies of this sort, Iran emerges as a vil-
lain, the report alleging that under “the guise of a peaceful nuclear program,
the Iranian authorities have been obtaining the latent ability to make nuclear
weapons.” The word “latent” is critical in this indictment, since almost any
enrichment program anywhere in the world has such a potential and the
implication is that the ambiguities of latency are proof enough of intent. Such
an approach to nuclear weapons in the Middle East has no hope of success,
unless one entertains a fantasy — as the American government has for sev-
eral years — that tough sanctions, at some undefined point, will force Iran to
foreswear its “latent ability.” No word in the recommendations can be found

5. Robert J. Pranger, “The Iraq Problem Will Remain with Us,” Mediterranean Quarterly 14,
no. 3 (2003): 29.
6. US Nuclear Weapons Policy, Independent Task Force Report no. 62, chaired by William J. Perry
and Brent Scowcroft (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2009), 85 – 90.
16   Mediterranean Quarterly: Fall 2009

regarding Israel’s nuclear capabilities, except its failure to ratify the Compre-
hensive Test Ban Treaty (the Senate has not ratified it yet, either), but since
Jerusalem has never admitted having such weapons, they too must be latent.
The report goes on to push for further cuts in the nuclear stockpiles of the
United States and Russia as setting a good example for others who would imi-
tate the two giants. We flatter ourselves with such paternalism.
From an international relations standpoint, the nuclear proliferation prob-
lem has its origins in competition among nations for hegemony, with atomic
weapons providing either some special leverage or a deterrent that works to
ensure a balance of power. Both American and Russian (formerly Soviet)
nuclear policies have been tempted to gain special advantages, a danger-
ous game that raises fear of an opportunistic “first strike” without a com-
parable response in kind or “second strike” from one’s opponent, as in the
Soviet obsession with President Ronald Reagan’s SDI or “Star Wars” missile
defense program. We see a repetition of this in our argument with the cur-
rent Russian regime over our plans for a defensive “shield” in Europe against
what we say could be possible Iranian rocket strikes. However, the course
of arms control negotiations between Moscow and Washington has worked
strenuously to forestall such temptations, emphasizing instead a balance of
power or, as one expert has called it, “a delicate balance of terror.”7 The par-
allel in the Middle East would be Iran and Israel negotiating a nuclear arms
agreement that would ensure stable deterrence, an unlikely development in
the foreseeable future.
The July 2009 presidential election in Iran became an event of wide
international interest precisely because it indicated substantial unease in
the Iranian body politic over the continuation of Khomeini’s revolutionary
ideology in international affairs, an ideology that has brought the Palestin-
ian struggle and Israel into the ambitious agenda of Iranian foreign pol-

7. An expression famously coined by Albert Wohlstetter in his 1958 article in Foreign Affairs, “The
Delicate Balance of Terror,” reprinted in Henry A. Kissinger, ed., Problems of National Security
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 34 – 58. An interesting treatment of nuclear risk-taking
from a well-informed Soviet perspective, the author still influential in Russia and the United States,
can be found in Alexei G. Arbatov, Lethal Frontiers: A Soviet View of Nuclear Strategy, Weapons,
and Negotiations, trans. Kent D. Lee (New York: Praeger, 1988). The book, in its English language
version, was originally published in Moscow during 1984 in a more polemical style, carries a fore-
word by the late William G. Hyland, a long-time American expert on the same subject.
 Pranger: Resetting Iran in US Policy   17

icy. Ahmadinejad’s gratuitous challenge of the Holocaust’s reality and his

explicit linkage of his country’s nuclear program to war with Israel — as
the Iraq War is winding down and Iran has clearly emerged as its chief
beneficiary in terms of Middle Eastern power — demonstrates an uncomfort-
able linkage between Iran’s quest for hegemony in the region or even in the
entire world of Islam and its nuclear ambitions. Had Ahmadinejad lost the
2009 election to his opponent, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the Khomeini revolu-
tionary vision could have faced considerable modification in more realistic,
less ideological directions. And what will be most interesting for the United
States to explore, now that Ahmadinejad has been installed for a second
presidential term, will be the views among Iran’s leading clerics, including
the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard, as to what, if any,
modifications in their country’s foreign and defense policies may be under
consideration, not only for reasons of international pressure but because of a
domestic public opinion that has become fractured on matters of peace and
war — including nuclear war.
The answer to nuclear proliferation everywhere is the extent to which
domestic opinion in any given country is willing not only to support develop-
ment of such weapons in pursuit of hegemony but is also ready to suffer the
consequences of using them or, in Iraq’s case, the “shock and awe” from
another power because their leaders have carelessly threatened to use them.
Unhappily, Ahmadinejad has made such threats, much to the consternation
of the international community.
It is time for the United States to look behind the public uproar in Iran
over the results of the 2009 presidential election to discover more about
lessons learned, if any, by its leadership. Such information, more than fur-
ther details on the specifics of the Iranian nuclear program, could lead to
American encouragement of a modification of ideological ambitions in Teh-
ran, a revisionism as significant for world peace as what took place in Mos-
cow and Beijing in an earlier period with the support of realistic policies by
Washington.
As in arms control agreements among the major nuclear powers, a suc-
cessful policy of nonproliferation depends on increasing pragmatism and
diminishing ideological fervor among nations apparently determined to use
the development of nuclear weapons as a means of achieving hegemony in
18   Mediterranean Quarterly: Fall 2009

world affairs. The secret to a successful nonproliferation policy with Iran lies
in Tehran’s willingness to modify Khomeini’s revolutionary ideology and,
above all, to abandon Iran’s suicidal crusade against Israel. Such modifica-
tion comes through diplomacy, not force.

III

Looking back to the past for lessons does not suggest that the origins of Amer-
ican policy in Iran can — or should — be duplicated. What we can learn,
however, pertains to a third-power style of behavior rather than the bluster
that now passes for foreign affairs leadership in Washington, a “world’s only
superpower” syndrome. To repeat what Lenczowski noted about the early
American presence in Tehran: “Iran treated the United States primarily as
a friendly ‘third power’ which should be brought gradually to this part of the
world.” This turns out to be an equally effective form of behavior in America’s
relations with Israel. Of paramount importance today and in the near future
is that Washington’s diplomacy become an effective instrument for heading
off war between Israel and Iran over the most critical issue for the Middle
East at this juncture, the competition between Jerusalem and Tehran for hege-
monic status in the region, using nuclear weapons as leverage in pursuit of
this objective.
We must provisionally put to one side all the grand designs for a more
effective nuclear nonproliferation regime and also park in a safe place out
of dangerous traffic our quest for a comprehensive Middle East peace. Of
monumental importance for world civilizations as we know them today looms
the strong possibility of a catastrophic, even nuclear war between Iran and
Israel — sooner rather than later — that could bring the Armageddon that
extreme ideologues on both sides await in fervent expectation.
To say that Washington should approach this crisis between Iran and Israel
as a third power rather than as supreme judge of the universe only gives an
idea of the proper location for American efforts in this instance. However, one
should make no mistake about how this nuclear calamity has come about: it
has arisen from an abject failure in Washington’s judgment regarding both
Israel and Iran. With the Israelis, the United States has been playing “hear
no evil/see no evil/speak no evil” games about a nuclear program it has fol-
 Pranger: Resetting Iran in US Policy   19

lowed closely for more than fifty years. And the great strategic beneficiary
of the Iraq war has been Iran, with an escalation of anti-Israel rhetoric and
threats to take military action, not excluding nuclear action, following the fall
of Shiism’s bête noire, Saddam Hussein. Both states are avowedly hegemonic
powers and both are now headed for a suicidal war with each other. In other
words, the United States bears great responsibility for this course of events,
and it now has a moral and political mandate to bring about, through media-
tion, some kind of stability in relations between Jerusalem and Tehran. In a
word, American Middle East policy has failed miserably, and it is time for
Washington to admit this publicly to the world and be very specific about
what it must do now — not to ally itself in military action with Israel against
Iran or seek even more punishing sanctions but to demilitarize its approach
and work, as a third power, in serious mediation.
How can we persuade the Iranians of our good intentions and garner their
trust? At this time the world knows a good deal more about Iran’s nuclear pro-
gram than Israel’s. To demonstrate good faith we will have to speak author-
itatively about the Israeli nuclear capability, and this requires an unprec-
edented transparency on Israel’s part. On the threshold of Armageddon all
covert subterfuge and clever rhetoric must be discarded as so much excess
baggage that only further seals the fate of the ship.
Some might argue that I am guilty of “moral equivalence” in thinking of
Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs as equally dangerous to America’s inter-
ests in a Middle East balance of power. Assessing the relative moral merits of
nations in international relations, however, depends entirely on who are the
judges. Americans have become very lazy in their moral reasoning in world
politics: they too easily assume that their nation, alleged to be the world’s only
superpower, is also entitled to be supreme judge of matters of good and evil
in the actions of others — a sense of moral as well as material entitlement. In
the final analysis, many think, might does make right and our superior mili-
tary force, if nothing else, gives us final say. In the case of Iran, however, we
confront a theocratic state whose leadership also feels divinely inspired. Per-
haps God is on our side, but we end up, as in Iraq, trying to prove this in very
ungodly ways. A sounder view of a healthy international community would be
one where God has assumed the role of the ultimate arbiter of human affairs
but plays no favorites — each of the three major monotheistic religions agree
20   Mediterranean Quarterly: Fall 2009

on the less-than-novel notion that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory
of God.”
So ultimately a sound foreign policy is based on pragmatics, and the prac-
ticalities of the Iran-Israel confrontation are that both seem intent on becom-
ing medium hegemonic powers in the same Middle Eastern neighborhood
and both see nuclear weapons as central to their ambitions. The United States
does not have to worry about difficulties of moral equivalence in adopting the
role of third-power mediator to allay an international catastrophe in order to
achieve some kind of balance of power between Jerusalem and Tehran, but it
will have to come to understand contemporary Iran as well as it claims to be
empathetic to Israel’s needs.
In other words, the United States must develop a détente relationship with
Iran, which in no way signifies, in practical terms, an acceptance of the
theological/moral underpinnings of the current Iranian regime. Yet détente
does mean that the United States will refrain, as a matter of policy, from
any ambition for regime change. Parallels here include US détente rela-
tions with the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China from the 1970s
onward. Ironically, in the Soviet case, détente, not nuclear bluster, led to the
fall of communism as an unintended consequence: doves not hawks won the
Cold War, a topic for another essay. In this sense, entering a détente with
the United States may prove more dangerous for Tehran than Washington,
and this could, in the final analysis, prevent the Iranian clerical establish-
ment from a rapprochement with the satanic Americans. Given to experimen-
tation in economic policy, however, the Obama administration seems to be
also tending in this same direction in its foreign policy, and Iran, as well as
other Bush administration moral outcasts like North Korea and Venezuela,
appear to be candidates for more pragmatic approaches by the United States.
Indeed, in the case of war between Iran and Israel, the fragile Obama eco-
nomic recovery could well be shattered by any such military conflict in the
Persian Gulf.
The word from Washington should go out: no more crusades against evil
doers, no more grand designs for democracy’s expansion, no more imperial
fantasies about restructuring Arab power in the region to ensure our domi-
nance, no more allegiance to strategies of instability, and no more intellectual
 Pranger: Resetting Iran in US Policy   21

treason in the “clash of civilizations.” American interests in the Middle East

require a stable balance of power in the region, and the US role must focus
on third-party mediation to prevent a calamitous war between two hegemonic
rivals. Such positive Washington behavior will ensure not only Iranian coop-
eration with us but Arab acceptance as well.8

8. On Saudi Arabia’s interest in possible bilateral talks between Iran and the United States, with
special attention to the move of Dennis Ross from the Department of State to the National Security
Council, see Roger Cohen, “The Making of an Iran Policy,” New York Times Magazine, 2 August
2009, 43. Cohen refers here to a meeting between Ross and Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz
in Dammam on 29 April 2009. Cohen, a New York Times columnist just back from Tehran, writes:
“Saudi Arabia may be full of millennial Arab suspicion of the Persians, and Ross may have all
sorts of ideas about how the Saudis could use their power to undermine the Iranians . . . but the
fact is the Saudis have had normal relations with Iran since 1991 and will always be more comfort-
able making life difficult for a Jewish state than for a fellow Muslim nation.” My own experience in
Saudi Arabia during the late 1990s indicated there were, as one would expect, very solid economic
as well as political reasons for stable relations with Tehran, a stability encouraged by the Chinese,
who have broadened their ties with both countries. The Chinese would ostensibly be opposed to any
US move against Iran with sanctions that would shift China’s oil purchases from Iran to Saudi Ara-
bia (they already buy Saudi oil). This was an idea, along with others, that Ross apparently raised
with King Abdullah only to be met, as Cohen tells it, with typical Abdullah bluntness: “I am a man
of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.”