Published August 5th, 2009 by Future Atlas
“On Iran, Do Nothing”
Fareed Zakaria advocates doing nothing with Iran in this week’s Newsweek (”On Iran, Do Nothing. Yet,” August 3, 2009, p. 26).
In the short term, the US should not confer legitimacy on the post-election regime, and in any case has already made a serious offer of talks.
In the longer term, he suggests that passive measures — deterrence and containment — are better than active alternatives in confronting a nuclear-armed Iraq. He notes that that approach “worked against Stalin and Mao and works against North Korea, a far more unstable and bizarre regime.”
Zakaria also examines the trend others have noted: that Ahmadinejad represents not the ultimate expression of the religious regime, but its loss of power to secular and military forces. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is losing its distinctive religious basis and becoming another Middle Eastern dictatorship — except that it now hosts an opposition movement that does not seem ready to quiet down.”
It is unclear which Iranian elite is “better” from a Western perspective: the mullahs don’t have the “apocalyptic” mindset that some in the US and Israel ascribe to them, Zakaria notes, but they do have deep-seated beliefs that tend them toward anti-Western and anti-Israeli directions. Ahdmadinejad’s faction could conceivably end up more pragmatic; one of his recent disputes with the clerics was based on his appointment of a top deputy who said that Iranians were friends with everyone, “even Israelis,” contravening a central tenet of Iranian policy.