Unthinkable (26 page)

The only obvious answer is the regime's control over Iran itself. No government wants to be replaced, and the Islamic Republic has gone to
enormous lengths to retain power. The more cynical rationale to support economic sanctions was not the belief that the Islamic leadership valued the Iranian economy more than their nuclear program, but that crippling sanctions would cause such economic duress that it would spark popular agitation against the regime. This unrest would frighten the leadership that it might lose control over the country, and would persuade them to compromise on their nuclear and foreign policy to get the sanctions lifted. Adopting an explicit policy of regime change under this rationale would mean sticking with the same strategy but focusing on a different approach to threatening the regime.

There are a lot of good reasons to oppose a policy of regime change. Before addressing them, however, it is important to deal with two that crop up from time to time that are not good rationales to eschew regime change. Unfortunately, one of them seems to be a guiding principle of the Obama administration.

THE FALSE CHOICE.
Somewhere, someone is likely to point out that the rationales for pursuing regime change listed above are in conflict. If our goal is to replace the Islamic Republic either because it is morally right or because the regime is inherently inimical to American interests and so must be removed, this notion is incompatible with the idea of pursuing regime change in Iran as a “stick” to convince Tehran to make meaningful concessions on its nuclear program. If the Iranians ever were to come to us and say, “If you call off your efforts to overthrow our regime, we will agree to give up all enrichment activities,” the third rationale for pursuing regime change would argue that the United States should agree. But this agreement would be inimical to the first and second rationales. By their logic, accepting a deal on the nuclear side would be selling out not only the Iranian people but our own interests.

At a theoretical level, this conclusion may be true enough, but it is
unlikely to be compelling in practice and therefore not a good reason to eschew regime change. It is the kind of argument that gets academics wrapped around an axle but rarely happens in the real world—and is more easily solved than is typically recognized. And it is not the case that if we cannot untangle this conundrum, we should not pursue regime change at all.

If the United States pursues regime change, there are four possible outcomes:

1. The policy fails. The regime does not collapse and does not feel enough pressure to make any concessions on its nuclear program or anything else. In this case, this dilemma is moot. Since, as I discuss below, this outcome is arguably the most likely, the most likely probability is that this conundrum is irrelevant.

2. The policy succeeds. A rapid overthrow of the regime ensues, and its fall is so swift that the regime does not even offer us a deal on the nuclear program before it collapses. In this case too, this dilemma becomes irrelevant. Unfortunately, this outcome is also the least likely.

3. The policy succeeds more slowly. Pressured and imperiled, the regime refuses to make concessions, seeing them as a poison pill that would speed its demise. This scenario seems to reflect Iran's general approach to concessions. Again, there is no dilemma for the United States to face, since the regime isn't interested in making concessions.

4. The policy succeeds slowly, but the regime decides to compromise—or at least to see what the terms might be. The regime offers to halt their nuclear program in return for Washington ending its regime change efforts.

Only in that last scenario does the United States face this dilemma at all, and that last scenario is not all that likely. Moreover, solving the dilemma is not hard.

If the Iranians make us that offer, we have a choice. We can tell the Iranians that it is too late, that the deal is no longer on the table, and
continue the regime change program in the expectation that it will bring down the regime. Alternatively, we can make the deal, end Iran's nuclear weapons program, and try to find other ways to support the aspirations of the Iranian people in a more indirect fashion. The latter is what we did with the Cubans as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and with the Soviets at Helsinki in 1975. In the latter case, we agreed not to try to bring down the USSR or its control over Eastern Europe through direct action, but we continued to provide indirect, rhetorical, and other support to Eastern European opposition movements. We also maintained sanctions and other forms of pressure on the Soviet Bloc (as we did with Cuba after the Cuban Missile Crisis).

One can make the case that this tactic would mean “selling out” the Iranian people. There were people who made that argument about the Cubans after 1962 and the Eastern Europeans after the 1975 Helsinki Accords. If we felt that was the case, or more the case with Iran, we could turn down the Iranian offer and continue pursuing regime change. However, many others saw both the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Helsinki Accords as critical elements in avoiding World War III that still allowed for the eventual collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989—although it has still not resulted in the liberation of the Cuban people.

Nevertheless, if this scenario occurred, the United States would simply have a choice. A painful choice perhaps, but a choice. Making such a choice would not undermine our Iran policy. In many ways it would be a great choice to have—far, far better than the choices available today. It would be a choice born of success, not of failure, as we have today.

Moreover, there are many ways to make that choice. One way would be to assess how close to collapse the Iranian regime seemed. That could only be a judgment call and could be wrong. However, the U.S. government must make judgment calls all the time. Indeed, whatever policy we adopt toward Iran will be a judgment call due to the limits on our knowledge about Iran and its intentions. Nevertheless, if we felt that the regime was imperiled, we might decide to press on and rid the world of these meddlesome priests (to paraphrase Henry II). In contrast, if we believed
the regime had a strong chance of surviving no matter what we did, we might decide to accept the deal as being in the best interests of the United States and our allies in the region.

MISREADING HISTORY.
From the start, the Obama administration has been working under the assumption that the pursuit of regime change and the pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran are mutually exclusive. They have assumed that if Khamene'i and the hardliners believe that the United States is determined to overthrow them, they will see no reason to strike a deal with Washington—especially a deal that would deprive them of a nuclear arsenal. To senior administration officials, this assumption is just “common sense,” logical behavior by Tehran that requires no evidence to take it as valid. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support this point of view.

The administration could be right. With Iran, anything is possible. But it seems unlikely. First, Iran's record has been that when the regime feels most threatened (as in 1996–98 and 2003), it is most likely to offer concessions. In the wonderful phrase of Karim Sadjadpour, “Iran does not respond to pressure, but it does respond to a
lot
of pressure.” Likewise, there is no evidence to suggest that when Iran does not feel threatened it will make concessions. That has simply never happened.

The Obama administration's own first term exemplifies this phenomenon. Washington tried to avoid giving Tehran any reason to believe that the United States was working to overthrow the Islamic Republic, including making only the most tepid and perfunctory statements of support for the Green Movement at a time when most of the world was offering them full-throated cheers and heaping abuse on the regime for its brutal crackdown. Yet this statecraft yielded no willingness to compromise on the part of the Iranians. Instead, during the Obama administration's first term, what did seem to incline Iran at least to talk was the economic threat of sanctions. And a major element of the relative success of the sanctions has been the gap that they have begun to create between the regime and its people. So the administration's belief that the United States
should not threaten the Iranian regime's grip on power because doing so would make Tehran less likely to compromise runs contrary to its own rationale for imposing sanctions on Iran: the sanctions are designed to get the Iranian regime to compromise by conjuring that very threat.

This dynamic is not lost on the Iranians, who see it as “common sense” that the sanctions are intended to undermine the regime's grip on power. While everyone else around the world seemed to recognize that throughout Obama's first term Washington tried to avoid giving any indication that it might be interested in regime change in Tehran, the Iranian leadership continued to insist that regime change was America's only goal. Khamene'i has complained endlessly that the United States under the Obama administration has been waging a “soft war” against Iran. intended to foment a popular revolt against the Islamic Republic. Thus there is no point in refraining from pursuing regime change; the Iranians are convinced that is what we are up to anyway, and it has been our relative success in raising that very fear (via the sanctions) that started the Iranian leaders debating their nuclear program in the first place.

For these reasons, I disagree with the administration's assumption that pursuing regime change would hurt the chances that Tehran would agree to concessions. I think the administration has that backward. There is a danger of mirror-imaging when it comes to Iran. Westerners have a bad habit of asking what they would do if they were Iran's leaders, and then assuming the Iranians will do the same. The history of U.S.-Iranian relations has demonstrated that the Iranians do not think like American decision-makers. They hold different assumptions, different goals, different perspectives on the world, and different interpretations of history, all of which lead them to different ideas about what to do and how to do it. It is one of the most important among many reasons that Americans have so often misunderstood Iranian intentions and failed to predict Iranian actions. Of all the reasons not to pursue regime change—and there are a lot—fearing that our greater pursuit of regime change will make Tehran less willing to compromise on its nuclear program should not be among them.

In the abstract, there are at least three good reasons for the United States to pursue regime change toward Iran. Unfortunately, there are also a number of very practical problems to doing so. Ultimately, it could prove difficult, even impossible, to remove the regime in Tehran. It is not even clear if American efforts to help that process along would help or hurt.

In 1953, the United States helped to engineer the fall of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the popular prime minister of Iran. There are a lot of myths surrounding this event. One that need not concern us is the common Iranian misperception that Mosaddeq was a champion of democracy and had been democratically reelected—he wasn't. (He was democratically elected in 1948, but he subverted the 1952 elections in an unconstitutional fashion).
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What is of importance is the notion that the CIA toppled Mosaddeq with help from Britain's MI6. The CIA and MI6 tried their hardest, and both did play important
supporting
roles in his ouster, but the truth is that Mosaddeq was primarily brought down by his own internal opponents—Khomeini's intellectual forebear, Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani; monarchists; middle-class liberals; disaffected military officers; and others. At most, the CIA and MI6 galvanized and assisted those forces, but Mosaddeq's internal foes were gunning for him anyway. It seems unlikely he would have lasted long even without the United States and the Brits. My intent here is not to absolve the United States or Great Britain from its role in Mosaddeq's fall, but to point out that on the one occasion when the United States contributed to regime change in Iran, it was primarily an inside job. This history should make us circumspect about our ability to pull it off a second time.
¹²

There has only ever been one other occasion when the United States even tried to affect governance in Tehran. In early 1979, as the Shah's regime was collapsing, the Carter administration belatedly decided to try to prevent the loss of its most important ally in the Persian Gulf. In January, as the Shah was packing up to leave, the White House dispatched General Robert “Dutch” Huyser to Tehran to try to convince the Iranian
Armed Forces to step in, restore order, and assist the Shah's last prime minister (and nominal successor), Shapour Bakhtiar, to establish a liberal democracy. Huyser discovered that the situation had long before passed the point of no return. There was not even an attempt at a counterrevolution.
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The Huyser mission is noteworthy as it too demonstrates the difficulty, even impossibility, of bringing about regime change in Iran without the participation of powerful internal forces.

After 1979, the United States never again tried to overthrow the Iranian regime, despite the paranoid obsessions of the Iranian leadership. The Reagan administration debated the idea of mounting a covert action program to try to destabilize Iran by building an armed opposition within the country, but the idea went nowhere.
¹⁴
The CIA felt that there was no credible group within Iran that could become the kernel around which to build an insurgency, and the State Department feared that trying would cause harsh Iranian reactions against moderates at home, and against the United States and its allies abroad.
¹⁵

Reagan wasn't the last president to wish that he could find a way to get rid of the Iranian regime, nor was he the last to conclude that desirable as regime change might be, it wasn't workable. Many Iranians may dislike their government and want a change, but they tend to be proud nationalists, resentful of foreign meddling in their internal affairs. Since the early twentieth century, political figures depicted as tools of foreign powers have tended to lose whatever popular support they may have had, making it hard for outside powers to back indigenous forces for change. Abbas Milani of Stanford University notes, “Anyone who wants American money in Iran is going to be tainted in the eyes of Iranians.”
¹⁶
Not surprisingly, the State Department has often struggled to spend the money it has allocated to promote democracy.
¹⁷
I used to say that when it came to regime change in Iran, the United States had a “Groucho Marx” problem: we should not give money to any Iranian willing to take money from us—only con men and agents of the secret police would be willing to do so and any legitimate oppositionist would never countenance it.