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Negotiating With the Devil Philip V. Brennan John Kerry thinks that the solution to the problem with Iran's nuclear program is diplomatic negotiations with Iran. This comes as no surprise — if the issue was the Ten Commandments, Kerry would want us to sit down and discuss possible compromises with the devil.
This, essentially, is what he's suggesting when he demands that the Bush administration sit down and talk to the Iranian government, which may not be Satan but is doing a pretty good job of imitating him.
The idea that President Bush or John Kerry or anybody else could have a rational discussion with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (it took me months to learn how to spell Schwarzenegger and now I have to grapple with Ahmadinejad, which I can't even pronounce), or the sinister cabal of mullahs who are the real power in Iran, kind of boggles the imagination.
In his book "Tehran Rising" Professor Ilan Berman, Vice President for Policy at the American Foreign Policy Council, made a prima facie case for Iran — not its ally al-Qaida — being the principal source for the global Islamic revolution. Berman recalled that in the preamble to the new Iranian constitution way back in 1979, it was clearly stated that the nation's armed forces "will be responsible not only [for] safeguarding our borders, but also for accomplishing an ideological mission, that is Jehad for the sake of God, as well as for struggling to open the war for the sovereignty of the Word of God throughout the world."
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In pursuit of that goal it set up its revolutionary army, the Pasdaran, a kind of Islamic SS, the force behind Hezbollah and the forces of global jihad and which now dominates the highest levels of the Iranian government.
In testimony in July before a couple of U.S. Senate committees, Berman, one of the nation's best-informed experts on Iran, flatly stated that "negotiations with the Islamic Republic are futile." The reason: Iran's absolute refusal to bow to demands that it stop its efforts to have at least the capability to built nuclear weapons ("Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has defined an Iranian nuclear capability as an 'absolute right' that his regime will never consider abandoning") and its failure even to consider abandoning the goal of exporting Islamic domination over the entire world.
"The past several years have seen a re-entrenchment of conservative forces in the Iranian body politic," Berman told the senators. "Iran's clerical army, the Pasdaran, has been the principal beneficiary of this trend, taking on major new political and economic powers within the regime."
Its members, he explained, "are overwhelmingly military strategists and tacticians, rather than professional clerics, and generally lack the political experience of Iran's clerical establishment (including the ability to safely navigate international crises)." This fact, he said, "has created a significant shift in the regime's traditional balance of power — one that includes the emergence of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself a former Pasdaran commander, as an independent foreign policy actor in his own right."
Chillingly, Berman believes that at least one segment of the Iranian leadership now appears to be seeking a military showdown with the U.S.
Since Ahmadinejad took power in August 2005, Berman recalls that he "has charted an increasingly confrontational foreign policy course vis-a-vis the United States and Europe. Significantly, this brinksmanship appears to have deep theological underpinnings. Like his religious mentor, the radical Qom cleric Mohammed Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, Iran's president believes fervently in the imminent return of the 'Mahdi,' the Islamic Messiah of Shi'ite theology."
Added Berman, "Ahmadinejad has made clear [that] this second coming will be brought about through a civilizational clash with the West — 'a historic war between the oppressor [Christians] and the world of Islam,' in which Iran will play a leading role."
Diplomatic negotiations that could lead to deterring Iran from using its nuclear weapons "would therefore be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with the current Iranian leadership — effectively making Iran 'undeterrable' in the traditional sense of the word," Berman said.
Berman dismisses military action against Iran, which he says will merely strengthen the regime. "Few observers, either in the United States or abroad, doubt that America possesses the operational capability to carry out such a strike. But tactical considerations — among them incomplete intelligence about the scope of Iran's nuclear effort and the possibility of a serious asymmetric response from the Iranian regime — mitigate strongly against pursuing such a course of action as anything other than a last resort."
"Perhaps most significant, however, are the internal ramifications of any prospective military strike," he added. "Since Iran's nuclear program is one of very few issues that is supported both by ordinary Iranians and regime hard-liners within the Islamic Republic, military action is likely to result in a 'rally around the flag' effect that strengthens — rather than weakens — the current regime in Tehran."
None of this, however, means that Iran does not face serious problems that can be exploited to rein in the regime. Berman lists what he calls three priorities. Today, the Islamic Republic possesses at least three fundamental economic vulnerabilities:
"These components are interdependent," Berman noted. "Without economic pressure, the international community cannot hope to slow the pace of Iran's nuclear program. Truly eliminating the threat posed by an atomic Islamic Republic, however, requires changing the regime that will ultimately wield an Iranian bomb. And neither goal can be accomplished without the assistance of the one constituency that truly represents the future of Iran: the Iranian people themselves."
The last suggestion holds much promise, since domestic unrest has become a serious problem for the regime. The great mass of the Iranian people despise the despotic regime that oppresses them.
Said Berman: "The United States cannot fracture the current domestic consensus in favor of the regime's nuclear program without highlighting to the Iranian people the risks associated with the runaway atomic ambitions of their government. Nor can it hope to convey to the majority of Iranians that oppose the current regime in Tehran that it stands with them in their desire for change without proper outreach.
"Yet today, American public diplomacy falls far short of these objectives. Despite widespread popularity, the U.S. government's principal vehicles for public broadcasting into Iran, Radio Farda and the Voice of America's Persian Service, continue to suffer from serious systemic dysfunctions. These include suboptimal programming, a lack of defined goals and no metrics by which to measure success. As a result, American outreach is overwhelmingly reactive, often irrelevant, and at times downright damaging to U.S. objectives.
"If it hopes to persevere in the battle for Iranian 'hearts and minds,' the United States must craft a clear message of hope and transformation that is continuously calibrated to the Iranian 'marketplace,' and that message must be capable of penetrating the regime's increasingly sophisticated barriers. And, if official public diplomacy channels are not up to the task, the U.S. government should empower U.S.-based NGOs capable of effectively carrying such a message."
Anybody listening?
Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.
Editor's note:
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