Senate Foreign Relations
committee chairman Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, likes to portray himself
as a realist, not an idealogue.
After a recent Lugar speech on America's "addiction" to foreign oil,
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman gushed that readers
should "[d]rop what you are doing and read
it."
But in his efforts to achieve a bipartisan approach toward Iran,
Lugar has fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the Ayatollah's
book. Speaking on ABC's "This Week" on April 17, Sen. Lugar opined
that the United States should pursue direct talks with the Islamic
Republic over its nuclear program. "I think that would be useful," he
said. "The Iranians are a part of the energy picture. We need to talk
about that."
He added that it was too soon to press for international sanctions
aimed at putting pressure on Iran to comply with UN Security Council
demands that it open its nuclear facilities to international
inspection and come clean about suspected weapons programs. "I
believe, for the moment, that we ought to cool this one, too," Lugar
said. "We need to make more headway diplomatically."
Senator Christopher Dodd, D-CT, made it a duet. "I happen to believe
you need direct talks. It doesn't mean you agree with them...But
there's an option," Dodd said on the same program.
"Direct talks" with the Tehran regime are not just a bad idea. They
are a monumentally bad idea, whose wrong-headedness has been
proven time and again over the past¬Ý26 years.
And yet, even smart people -- such as Sen. Lugar -- fall for the idea
that the Iranian leadership, in the end, is not all that different
from us. They have security concerns, economic concerns, and
political concerns. It's just a question of finding the right
inducements, and then reasonable people can cut a deal.
Here is what Lugar said about Iran in the
speech at Brookings
that Tom Friedman found so illuminating.
At a time when the international community is attempting to persuade
Iran to live up to its non-proliferation obligations, our economic
leverage on that country has declined due to its burgeoning oil
revenues. If one tracks the arc of Iran's behavior over the last
decade, its suppression of dissent, its support for terrorists, and
its conflict with the West have increased in conjunction with its oil
revenues, which soared by 30 percent in 2005.
Iran literally has us over a barrel, Lugar argued. So we really
aren't in much of a position to be talking tough with the ayatollahs
(or the bearded boy president), unless we want to face $200-a-barrel
oil.
The only problem with Sen. Lugar's analysis is that it is factually
wrong. If one "tracks the arc of Iran's behavior over the last
decade," one finds absolutely zero correlation between Iran's oil
revenues and its bad behavior.
None. Nada. Zippo.
In fact, as Iran's oil revenues have skyrocketed over the past year,
it has not (yet) resumed its practice of sending hit squads around
the world to assassinate dissidents.
It began the assassinations in earnest in the mid-1980s, when oil had
plummeted to all-time lows (below $10/barrel) and continued the
murders until 1997. What compelled Iran to put its goons on a leash
-- at least, overseas -- was the sentence handed down by a German
court for the assassination of four Iranian Kurdish dissidents in
Berlin's Mykonos restaurant five years earlier.
(By the way: the Austrian Interior Ministry is currently reviewing
evidence that appears to confirm the personal involvement of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 1989 murder of Iranian dissident
Abdelrahman Qassemlou in Vienna).
As for repression at home, that continues apace. Whenever the Iranian
people rise up, the regime squashes their movement with brutal force,
whenever and wherever it feels it necessary.
How about Iran's nuclear programs? Haven't they benefited from
skyrocketing oil prices? Undoubtedly. But the decision to pursue a
clandestine program to master the uranium fuel cycle did not begin
this past year, or in 2004, or 2003: it, too, was launched when oil
prices were at their nadir, in 1985. The decisions to build big
ticket facilities such as the Isfahan uranium conversion plant or the
Natanz centrifuge enrichment plant were taken in the 1996 and 2000
respectively, when oil was running just over $20/barrel.
As Ayatollah Khomeini famously said, Iran's Islamic revolution "isn't
about the price of watermelons." If it were, the clerics would have
been long gone by now.
Lugar is not the first to suggest "direct talks" with Iran's clerical
leadership. Jimmy Carter tried for two years during the hostage
crisis. Ronald Reagan sent Ollie North, Howard Teicher, and Bud
McFarlane to Tehran in 1986 with a bible and a cake. Bill Clinton was
hoping to win the Nobel Peace Prize by personally traveling to Tehran
during his final days in the White House, and had named a Special
Ambassador, David Andrews, to negotiate a "comprehensive settlement"
with Tehran, as I reveal in Countdown
to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with
Iran.
All of these attempts failed. Iran's clerical leaders ate all the
carrots, burped, and never even said "thank-you." And should we make
similar offers today, they will do the same.
Zbigniew Brzezinski agrees with Sen. Lugar that the United States
should "negotiate" with Tehran. In case some readers are too young to
remember, Mr. Brzezinski was Jimmy Carter's National Security
Advisor. His deep understanding of Iran gave us a 444-day hostage
crisis that began on Nov. 5, 1979.
Despite this stunning proof of Mr. Brzezinski's policy acumen, many
reasonable people still seek his counsel today. Together with Bush 41
National Security advisor Brent Scowcroft, Brzezinski authored a 2004
study on Iran for the Council on Foreign Relations, which urged the
United States to craft a package of inducements for Tehran, including
security guarantees for the regime.
During a Feb. 23, 2006 forum in Washington, D.C., with former German
foreign minister Joschka Fischer, Brzezinski scolded Undersecretary
of state Nicholas Burns for saying the U.S. would not restore
diplomatic relations with Iran because it doesn't want to bestow
legitimacy on the Islamic Republic.
Washington was talking directly to dictator Kim Jong-il. "Are we
deliberately legitimizing the North Korean government?" Brzezinski
asked. The real issue, he said, is the quest for nuclear weaponry,
not the legitimacy of any regime.
Wrong, Mr. Brzezinski. And wrong, Sen. Lugar.
The real issue is not the quest for nuclear weaponry. If nuclear
weapons were the problem, we'd be worried about Great Britain. Or
India. Or Israel. Or France. (Okay, maybe we are just a little
worried about France.)
The real issue is the regime; and this is the reality neither
Sen. Lugar nor Mr. Brzezinski want to face.
Talking to this regime would, in fact, provide legitimacy for a band
of international thugs who have broken every agreement they have ever
made, and have never hesitated to use terrorists to accomplish their
ends.
It would send a devastating message to the Iranian patriots who are
begging America to help them bring freedom to their country.
It would undercut President Bush's visionary calls for spreading
freedom to closed societies, as America's best defense and the
world's brightest future. And it would guarantee that we would be
facing a nuclear-armed Iran.
Surely Sen. Lugar can do better than this.
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