By Philip Stephens
Published: July 2 2009 19:12
No one watches events in Iran more closely than Israel. Tehran has long been the abiding preoccupation, some would say obsession of political discourse in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Now the story line has changed.
At first glance the violent repression deployed by Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s regime in the wake of last month’s presidential election has been grist to the mill. The images of beaten and bloodied demonstrators have described vividly to a global audience Israel’s long-held view of the Iranian theocracy. Yet the implications do not all run in the same direction. The apparent fixing of the poll result and the subsequent crushing of dissent has also made the case for more rather than less engagement by the west.
Before one or two of my regular correspondents of a neo-conservative leaning accuse me of going soft on an authoritarian Islamist regime with nuclear ambitions, I should say that this point was made to me this week in Tel Aviv by a shrewd member of the Israeli diplomatic establishment and sometime adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – no friend of the ayatollahs, in other words.
The reaction of western governments to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s determination to remain in power suggests a different course. The Group of Eight rich nations has issued a strong – by diplomatic standards – denunciation of violence against demonstrators. I am sure I was not alone in seeing a certain irony in Russia’s signature on a document affirming individual liberties. That aside, the condemnations of the suppression of peaceful protest – including those of the European Union and the US administration – were surely right in their rejection of Tehran’s flimsy efforts to blame the west for the flowering of Iranian democracy.
Mir-Hossein Moussavi, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s opponent, was not offering the radical departure in Iranian politics that some Republicans in Washington have chosen to imagine. The presidential contest was a power struggle within Iran’s revolutionary family.
That said, the popular reaction to the apparent vote-rigging has indeed changed the game. The authority of the regime has suffered irrecoverable damage. Few of those who took to the streets will believe that it was all an American, or even more unlikely, a British plot.
This observation was offered to me by another Israeli. Isaac Herzog, the Labour minister for welfare and social services in the government coalition, recalled the occasions when his famous father visited the Shah’s Iran during the 1960s. Chaim Herzog would report back that the Shah was living on borrowed time: the ruler had grown too distant from the ruled.
The same can now be said of the gulf between Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and Iran’s youthful middle classes, although, as with the Shah, the end may be some time in coming.
The earlier point made by the Israeli diplomat was that Iran was no longer the country the west had thought, or wanted to think, it was. The post-election scenes on the streets of Iranian cities would surely strengthen those who argued that the way to encourage Iran’s return to the international community was through engagement – by embracing the ambitions of the protesters rather than shutting them out along with the regime. No one could pretend that Iran was the monolith that is North Korea.
As for suggestions that Israel is ready to bomb Iran to prevent Mr Ahmadi-Nejad from getting his hands on nuclear weapons, the issue was now more complicated. “How do you bomb Neda?” the diplomat said, in a reference to Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose death on the streets of Tehran has become a symbol of the regime’s repression.
Mr Netanyahu would doubtless dispute this analysis, but the Israeli prime minister’s views no longer carry weight. Until my discussions this week with Israeli politicians and scholars from across the political spectrum I had not realised quite how comprehensively he had wrecked his own foreign policy.
If Mr Netanyahu had started out with a single strategic objective it was to engage Barack’s Obama’s administration in a joint project to put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. As an academic sympathetic to the prime minister’s predicament put it, he wanted above all from Washington “a credible policy on Iran”.
No matter that no one quite knew what such a policy would have amounted to; focusing on Iran would have allowed the prime minister to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the back-burner and sidestep international pressure to accept a two-state solution.
That was the plan. And what has happened? Mr Obama upturned the argument: a deal between Israel and the Palestinians was promoted in Washington as part of the broad regional initiative necessary to deal properly with Iran. Worse, from Mr Netanyahu’s perspective, Israeli-US relations have been reduced to an increasingly bitter argument about his refusal to halt settlement building on the West Bank.
As for Iran, the US president has indeed stepped back from immediate engagement. Doubtless he has been influenced by those who argue that restoring relations with Tehran would “legitimise” Mr Ahmadi-Nejad. Much the same argument was heard a few decades ago about détente with the Soviet Union.
But Mr Obama’s options remain open, as do those of European leaders. They should listen carefully to the voices in Iran who want the country to join the modern world.
Before visiting Israel I heard a prominent, Tehran-based academic put the case well. The policy of isolating Iran, he said, played into the hands of the regime by allowing it to demonise the US and its allies and forestall, in the name of national security, the opening up of society.
Breaking into this vicious circle will not be easy. It will require from Mr Obama a willingness to expend more political capital in explaining that diplomacy is not a synonym for defeatism. Engagement may well fail to persuade Iran to give up its quest for full mastery of the nuclear cycle – an ambition, incidentally, that the ayatollahs inherited from the Shah. It might just persuade Tehran not to build a bomb. In any event, the alternatives are all worse – unless, of course, Mr Obama feels he should take some foreign policy advice from Mr Netanyahu.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario