Why and how US Iran policy is paralyzed, as shown in the Wall Street Journal

Jay Solomon's Wall Street Journal article on current US thinking on Iran paints a picture of a Barack Obama administration completely bewildered by the question of how to set policy regarding Iran's nuclear program.

In a signal of the White House's increased attention to Iran's political upheaval, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gathered over coffee at the State Department this week with four leading Iran scholars and mapped out the current dynamics, said U.S. officials. One issue explored was how the U.S. should respond if Tehran suddenly expressed a desire to reach a compromise on the nuclear issue. Mrs. Clinton asked whether the U.S. could reach a pact without crippling the prospects for the Green Movement.

OK. Who are these four supposed Iran scholars? How should the US respond if the Iranians suddenly express a desire to comply with US demands? As long as the US condition for "compromise" remains that the US should wield a veto over Iran's right to enrich uranium, Iran is not going to suddenly express a desire to compromise. There is no reason for a fantasy role playing game like this even to come up in a meeting between the US Secretary of State and four experts on Iran.

This expresses a fundamentally unserious approach to the issue of Iran's nuclear program. If I read a report of Iran's foreign minister meeting four supposed US experts examining the scenario of how Iran should respond if suddenly the US agreed to stop supporting Israel, I'd be disappointed that Iran's foreign minister doesn't know enough to understand that this is not a plausible scenario that merits examination. I'd be more disappointed in the experts who allowed the foreign minister to waste his and their time.

The article has more indications that the administration is unable to choose a direction in which to move.

In recent weeks, senior Green Movement figures -- who have been speaking at major Washington think tanks -- have made up a list of IRGC-related companies they suggest targeting, which has been forwarded to the Obama administration by third parties.
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Both the Obama administration and the Iranian dissidents have been wary of any direct contacts, due to fears such meetings could provide ammunition for Tehran.

Now administration officials obviously cooperated with Jay Solomon in sourcing this article. They could have imposed a condition that Solomon not directly tie the Green Movement to the administration in the same article. The supposed senior Green Movement figures would have done well to avoid discussing their cooperation with the Obama administration with the press. On the other hand, these are people giving speeches at Washington think tanks.

This is how the article starts:

The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran's government and moving to find ways to support Iran's opposition "Green Movement," said senior U.S. officials.

I'm not bothered that it is true that the US is trying to support the Green Movement, but I am bothered by reports being put into US newspapers. It seems to me that this is a sign that the US has given up any serious hope that the Green Movement can topple Iran's regime. I can only imagine that U.S. intelligence services have replicated the W.P.O. poll reporting over 80% popular support for the regime and found that support still high enough that it would not be raised higher if the US openly ties itself to the Green movement. That is what Solomon's article is doing.

The US commitment to the security of a majority state for 5 million Jewish people in Palestine puts a severe constraint on US policy in the region. In the case of Iran, it means the US cannot accept an arrangement that would leave Iran "nuclear capable", or having the option to build a bomb in an emergency even while remaining in the NPT the way Japan and Brazil do. Ariel Roth of the US Council on Foreign relations explains:

More broadly, as the Palestinian-American political scientist Hilal Khashan’s work on Arab attitudes toward peace has shown, the willingness of Arabs to make peace with Israel is a direct function of their perception of Israel’s invincibility. Just as an Iranian nuclear capability would imply a nuclear guarantee for anti-Zionist proxies, an Egyptian or Saudi nuclear capability would reduce incentives for other Arab states to make peace with Israel because, shielded under an Arab nuclear umbrella, they would no longer fear catastrophic defeat or further loss of territory.

Today the United States distorts its entire Middle East policy through the prism that the 5 million Jewish people of Palestine must retain the ability to threaten everyone else in the region with catastrophic defeat or loss of territory. This is not a long-term sustainable situation. Israel has a peculiar security need that is almost immeasurably expensive for the US to provide. A single state that accepts Palestinians and Jewish people equally without necessarily having a Jewish majority would not have that security need. Among many other things, if one state prevailed, the US would be able to end its confrontation over Iran's nuclear program on terms acceptable to the Iranians. With one state that is not necessarily Jewish-majority, the US could also end its expensive sanctions against Iran because Hamas and Hezbollah would no longer be a threat to Palestine.

Instead, while today the US cannot accept Iranian enrichment, it also cannot stop Iranian enrichment. Limited sanctions will not stop Iran's enrichment, but neither will broad sanctions or a military attack. The US does not have a choice between accepting an Iranian nuclear capability or bombing Iran. The US has a choice between accepting an Iranian nuclear capability or bombing Iran and then accepting an Iranian nuclear capability.

Iran will have a nuclear capability, the question is will this capability arrive in an environment of increasing cooperation or increasing hostility between the US and Iran. Of course, especially with vulnerable US positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US would prefer increasing cooperation.

But the dilemma is that Israel's security requires it to be able to make unanswerable catastrophic threats against its neighbors, while Iran cannot be stopped from breaking Israel's regional monopoly in nuclear capability. This dilemma has paralyzed the Obama administration's decision-making process. It has reached the point that Clinton spends time in meetings imagining what the US should do if she and her analysts pretend that Iran suddenly and for no particular reason just decides to submit to US demands.

The US is pursuing a long-shot chance that maybe the Green Movement will overthrow the Islamic Republic, but doesn't even take that chance seriously enough to take basic steps such as hiding or at least denying any involvement.

The US is in a bad situation. Its best move, if it does not want to formally accept Iranian enrichment, is to stall. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, supporters of Israel are able to apply pressure that the US take action, even though no action will prevent Iran from reaching nuclear capability and US measures, whether targeted sanctions or a full military attack, can only poison the environment, making conflict and US losses more likely.