The Cedar Lounge Revolution

The limits of soft humanitarian interventions… October 6, 2009

An odd piece in Slate last week from conservative historian Anne Applebaum, who writing about Iran argues for a form of soft humanitarian intervention. She suggests, and I think there is something in the idea that there are two Iran’s. The one of the ‘nuclear issue, the Iran analyzed by security experts, the Iran covered by the White House press corps. This is the Iran that made the news last week when President Barack Obama revealed the existence of yet another hidden Iranian nuclear reactor.’

And then she suggests that ‘there is another Iran—a completely different country, as it were. This is the Iran of the democracy movement, the Iran analyzed by human rights activists, the Iran covered by the sort of journalist who takes covert photographs with a cell phone. This is the Iran that made the news last week when protesters turned a government-controlled anti-Israel march into a spontaneous anti-government demonstration.’

She notes, and again I think there’s something in this as well, that:

The people who care about this second Iran are rarely much interested in the first one—and vice versa. The two groups sometimes seem almost antagonistic.

But the example she gives is:

When demonstrations exploded across Iran after the June 12 elections, for example, there were many well-meaning people who urged the U.S. president to distance himself from both the riots and the rioters, at least partly on the grounds that any involvement might affect his ability to deal with the nuclear issue.

And this, of course, from her perspective is not an unalloyed good…

Indeed, that choice seemed to suit President Obama, a highly rational man who clearly dislikes fuss, mess, and emotional upheaval. At that time, the White House made a choice: It would deal with the Iran described by security experts and leave the other Iran to sort itself out. Iranian human rights issues, Iranian democracy—these were domestic matters, the president’s men concluded. And they repeated their offer to meet Iran’s leaders.

Because…

Nothing came of that offer, of course, because Iran is not two countries. It is one country.

Which I think is a lot closer to the truth than the ‘two countries’ hypothesis. She continues:

And the people who make decisions about Iran’s nuclear program are the same people who order the arrest, torture, and murder of dissidents. Indeed, one can learn quite a lot about how these Iranian decision-makers will behave abroad by observing their behavior at home. For example, it is unlikely that a regime that publicly and repeatedly describes its opponents as American stooges and British spies is going to change its tune and cooperate with America or Britain. At the same time, a regime under immense political pressure that is losing its legitimacy is not in a good position to break any new diplomatic ground and is therefore unlikely to end its nuclear program any time soon.
Indeed.

For the observation that Iran is one country also suggests that the West has some foreign-policy tools in Iran that it has not yet seriously tried to use. Many, many security experts over the last several days have again pointed out that we don’t have many good options once we officially declare that Iran plans to build a nuclear bomb. There are sanctions, which probably won’t work; there are bombing raids, which might not hit all of Iran’s nuclear facilities, given how many appear to be secretly hidden inside mountains; and there is war, which would be a catastrophe.

Agreed. So, what alternatives exist?

Very few security experts point out that there is another option. What do Iran’s rulers truly fear, after all? I’ll wager it’s not sanctions, and it might not be a bombing raid. An economic boycott can be circumvented, after all, with the help of Venezuela or maybe the Russian mafia, and an attack on Iranian soil might help the regime once again consolidate power. By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a truly terrifying prospect.

Since Iran labours under sanctions so severe that military and civilian aircraft occasionally fall out of the sky for lack of serviceable parts the idea of further sanctions seems bizarre (although clearly not so bizarre that some will not contemplate them). Note too the modish right of centre lash at Venezuela which really has been given an overly exaggerated significance in various circles, particularly – but not exclusively – conservative ones. And this would manifest itself as…

What if we therefore told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice other than to increase funding for dissident exile groups, to smuggle money into the country, to bombard the airwaves with anti-regime television programming, and above all to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

Who though is ‘we’, and is that ‘we’ part of the problem? And…

What if President Obama held up a photograph of Neda, the young girl murdered by Iranian authorities, at his next press conference? What if he did that at every press conference? I bet that would unnerve President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even the supreme leader far more than the loss of some German machine tool imports or Dutch tomatoes.

She notes:

I do realize that many will roll their eyes at these suggestions and argue, as the Obama administration did this summer, that an aggressive focus on Iran’s mass human rights violations would allow the regime to cry “foreign meddling” and attack its opponents as foreign spies. But so what? They do that already. Given the potential for disaster that lurks behind almost every other policy option, we certainly have nothing to lose by trying.

Well, it’s a theory. The use of force is certainly pointless and counterproductive but to the issue is what is meant to be achieved here? From a US perspective preventing or delaying Iran becoming another nuclear power – whatever one’s thoughts about the actuality or the power relationships – is paramount. No wonder Obama focuses on that rather than on the more diffuse issue of human rights. And that points right back to a truth that the US is not two nations, but one nation as well. That its self-perceived security needs will largely outweigh other considerations and therefore the idea of Obama holding up a photograph of the victims of state repression isn’t isolated from a web of relationships that already exist and drag down even the best of intentions. And that in mind Obama, whatever hopes one projects onto him, does not – as it stand and despite some encouraging noises and even acts on various issues – have the capacity to act as an entirely honest broker in such matters.

The history of US/Iranian relations makes his interventions, however measured, however conciliatory or otherwise, too freighted with meaning. He is as much a prisoner of past actions and that shared history as anyone else.

But beyond that can one suggest seriously that the Iranian state would be bowed by such acts? The events that took place earlier in the year and subsequently were played out in the global media. The actions may have receded but their import remains and doesn’t vanish entirely. If we ascribe emotional responses such as fear, or indeed implicitly shame, this leads to clear problematics. Self-justification in the political sphere, or the religious sphere, is usually quite sufficient to allow for a rationalisation of even the most egregious actions and one could argue that the split between those who will countenance such acts and those who won’t, or not precisely – and who can be sure given that this is in some part an elite spilt, has already occurred. Those who won’t are currently beleaguered by those who will. The former beat the latter of the street and close down the societal and political space for them.

And that said, for what it’s worth, it seems to me that the Iranian regime has done a remarkably good job of destabilising and undermining its own legitimacy itself with no need for an assist from the outside world. The distance between the rhetoric of the Republic and the actuality has been shown up, the manner in which the state turns on not merely those who are identifiably dissident in every degree but those who were (and in some instances remain) a part of it has been demonstrated more than adequately for most.

Which is not to say that there is no need from pressure on the human rights front, quite the opposite, nor that the US, as with any state, does not have the right to make pronouncements on various matters or indeed that states acting alone or in concert can bring pressure to bear at many different levels including the moral. But the source of such pressure should be as clearly distinct from those with – or perceived to hold – vested interests as is possible.

Look, I know in pieces such as this one that concern themselves with events half a world away there’s a tendency towards vicarious hand-wringing from a safely detached and distanced perspective. It’s not for me to tell the Iranian people how to organise their lives, or indeed those in the US. And this hand-wringing can transmute into, say, in this instance a sort of generalised sense of ‘she should know better’…

But feck it, I don’t have to be half a world, or even a quarter of a world, away to know that holding up photographs at press conferences is not the way to go on this. Or to be precise the US President holding up photographs at press conferences is not the way forward. And if that’s the best she can come up with.. she really should know better.