Unthinkable (28 page)

Such tactics run counter to long-standing American thinking that providing active support to Iranian opposition groups would do little to advance their efforts and could taint them in the eyes of their countrymen as foreign spies. This assumption may still be valid, but we ought to be willing to test the proposition. American intelligence and diplomatic personnel should make clear that they are open to meeting Iranian opposition figures and open to providing assistance, if the oppositionists themselves are willing to accept it. At an even more basic level, it would be helpful to establish contact with Iranian oppositionists in hope of finding out from them what the United States might do that could be helpful. We have been so cut off from them for so many years that we have little ability to know what we could do that might be advantageous. Moreover, because of the regime's paranoia, it will doubtless inflate every surreptitious conversation into a full-scale covert campaign and overreact, potentially creating new opportunities for American action.

One of the most important things that the United States and its allies could do to put additional pressure on the Iranian regime would be to expand the focus of the international community's ire at Iran from its
nuclear program to its abuse of human rights. Leading Iranian dissidents and average citizens who oppose the regime argue that Iran's leaders are sensitive to any criticism of their human rights record because they fear that it delegitimizes them in the eyes of the world and their remaining domestic supporters. Moreover, calling Iran to account for its deplorable human rights abuses is likely to strike a much more responsive note with countries around the world—even those whose human rights records are far from spotless. Many other Third World countries resent the great powers' monopoly over nuclear weapons, but few will condone gross, systematic human rights violations. Indeed, the European left, once apologists for Iran, have now largely turned against it, incensed by the regime's brutal crackdowns, torture, and tales of prison rape.
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On human rights, the United States would have powerful and admired allies in the international human rights community. It would mean acting not just in the service of American interests, but for American and universal values. In a powerful December 2012 report, the respected independent organization Human Rights Watch found that the “[Iranian] government's repression has involved a range of serious and intensifying human rights violations that include extra-judicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, and widespread infringements of Iranians' rights to freedom of assembly and expression.”
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Indeed, both the EU and Canada have imposed sanctions on Iran purely for its human rights abuses.
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One route to help the Iranian opposition—and hurt the regime—is information warfare. The United States has made some tentative forays here, trying to reopen Internet service to Iran in the face of regime's efforts to choke it off, but much more can and should be done. The United States and its allies should actively seek ways to provide accessible, redundant means of communication (both overt and covert) to the Iranian oppositionists. The more that we can enable them to speak freely, the more the Iranian public and the world will be able to hear their message, and the better they can shake the foundations of the regime.

The United States might also provide support, even modest nonlethal
aid, to various Iranian ethno-sectarian minorities actively opposing the regime. None of these groups—not the Kurds, the Baluch, the Arabs, or others—is likely to overthrow the regime and there are serious complications involved in supporting each, but they might help turn up the heat. Moreover, since the regime is convinced that the United States is doing this covert work already, there would appear to be little further downside from stoking Tehran's suspicions.

SANCTIONS AND REGIME CHANGE.
If the United States adopted a policy of regime change, it would be critical to revamp the sanctions to contribute to this approach and ensure that they do not undermine it. Lawmakers and advocates of sanctions often overlook this point: sanctions can be employed in pursuit of a range of policy goals, including regime change, but they need to be crafted differently to best serve the particular goals. O'Sullivan noted in her study of the use of sanctions that it is possible to advance the goal of regime change via sanctions, but they need to be tailored to that purpose. In particular, she cited the case of sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s and '90s as helping to bring about regime change, but only because they were part of a wider strategy that also imposed other penalties like international isolation on the government while helping to empower a viable, legitimate indigenous opposition.
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Thus, if the United States either shifts wholesale to a policy of supporting internal opposition forces or does so as part of a last effort to make a carrot-and-stick strategy work, the overall question of how to employ economic sanctions has to be reconsidered. They need to be targeted to apply selective pressure on Iran over a prolonged period of time. In particular, the United States should begin to shift its sanctions efforts toward prohibiting foreign investment in Iran. American sanctions have already cut investment in Iran's hydrocarbon sector, and this success has proved painful for Tehran. The United States and its allies should look into targeting other sectors, particularly manufacturing and high-tech industries. O'Sullivan's points about South Africa provide a loose analogy,
in that a human-rights-based campaign focused on choking off direct foreign investment in South Africa succeeded in forcing the government to dismantle the apartheid system. The “divestment” campaigns, coupled with state and business actions, hurt South Africa's GDP, but never in a way that caused severe, direct harm to the vast majority of South Africans. Instead, what it did was to paint an unmistakable picture for the South African leadership that if they did not change, their country would be reduced to a poor pariah state. That proved intolerable. Given Iranian pretensions to great power status, a similar perspective might have equally helpful effects.

Over the course of my career, both in government and out, I have made arguments against regime change in Iran. I don't regret having done so. For most of that period, the facts at the time warranted these arguments. Regime change seemed unlikely; it seemed likely to produce a nasty backlash from Tehran, and there were other policy options that seemed more likely to succeed and at a more acceptable cost.

These factors have changed, even reversed. Regime change still does seem unlikely to succeed, but the emergence of a legitimate, indigenous, broad-based opposition to the regime—one willing to take to the streets and risk violence against itself—is a dramatic change. For the first time since 1979, regime change seems possible.

There is no question that the Iranian regime will be furious and will fight back, but given where we now are with them, it is not clear what more we would face. The regime believes that we are trying to overthrow it. It is mounting cyberattacks against us (perhaps “counterattacks” would be more accurate) and it is not clear how much more they can do. There are lots more terrorist operations they could conduct against American targets, both in the region, around the world, and in the American homeland, but I suspect that they have refrained from doing so largely
out of fear that such terrorism would provoke an American conventional military response—not out of any sense that the United States isn't trying to undermine the regime. And there is good reason for the Iranians to have this fear: on several occasions since 2007, the Brookings Institution has run crisis simulations (“war games”) in which Iran mounted terrorist operations more directly against the United States and the consistent American response was to mount a direct military attack against Iran—which often escalated to much larger exchanges that left both sides worse off, but left the Iranian military and nuclear programs devastated.

Third, and perhaps most important of all, our policy options are narrowing precipitously. Pure engagement is no longer an option, if it ever was. The carrot-and-stick is in danger of being proven a failure as well. We are approaching the awful choice between going to war with Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, or containing an Iran that may well possess a nuclear weapons capability—even an arsenal. Given how terrible that final choice is, we should be willing to consider almost any alternative that promises some possibility of avoiding it. And the events of 2009 have made regime change a faint possibility.

This is
not
to suggest that regime change is the answer to America's prayers, and that we should adopt it as our policy toward Iran in place of anything else. The United States ought to explore the possibility of pursuing a policy of regime change by aiding internal Iranian opposition forces. That's it. At present, we should “explore” this option. Because of all its downsides, all its risks and costs, we don't know if this option is feasible and, if it is feasible, whether it is worth those risks and costs.

Danielle Pletka's argument for regime change constitutes a final reason, and it may be the best of all. In the end, there may be nothing we can do to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability—or at least nothing else we can do to avoid the choice between war and containment. If regime change isn't feasible, if trying would only result in lots of dead Iranians and an undermined American position, it would be hard to
make even the moral argument that it was the “right” thing to do. But if it is viable, and if there were reason to believe that it would improve the American position, why not do the right thing? Why not live up to our values for a change and help so many Iranians striving for a better life? Why not be who we aspire to be, not who we so often are?

I
srael has been contemplating a military operation against the Iranian nuclear program for a very long time. In 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, Jerusalem purchased twenty-five F-15E fighter-bombers from the United States. At the time, these were the premier long-range tactical strike aircraft in the world and those purchased by Israel were designated the F-15I. The
I
stood for “Israel.” But whenever I spoke to Israeli Air Force officers, they would all go out of their way to say, “You may think that the
I
stands for ‘Israel,' but to us, it stands for ‘Iran.' ”

In 1997, I spent more than a year outside government, working at a Washington, D.C., think tank. In the office next to me for part of that time was an Israeli fighter pilot spending six months in Washington between assignments. This guy was a legend. He had numerous air-to-air kills in Israel's various wars and was famous for outflying his American counterparts in training drills, including the major “Red Flag” exercises at Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas. He was just coming off a tour
as the commander of one fighter squadron and was slated to take over another, even more prestigious, unit. He did not deny he was spending the six months thinking about how the Israeli Air Force (IAF) would try to destroy Iran's nuclear program if the Israeli leadership gave the order to do so. Before he left to go back to Israel and take over his new command, he and I had lunch. I asked him what he had come up with regarding a strike on Iran. He was blunt: “We can't do it. We don't have the horses. If someone is going to destroy the Iranian nuclear program, it is going to have to be you [the United States].”

And that is why we and the Israelis are where we are. A lot has changed since that conversation, but his conclusion remains valid. Certainly, the Israeli leadership fears that it is. Israeli leaders warn endlessly that they may have to strike Iran. There is a ferocious debate within the Israeli leadership about whether to strike Iran, a discussion that spills over into the public arena on a constant basis. This is entirely uncharacteristic of Israeli behavior. Almost no one—in Israel, in the United States, or anywhere else in the world—had ever heard of the Osirak reactor at Tuwaitha, Iraq, before the Israelis blew it up in 1981. Almost no one knew that there was a nuclear reactor being built at al-Kibar in the Syrian desert before the Israelis destroyed it in 2007. There were no public warnings, no open debate before either of these operations. Israel is not like the United States or other Western democracies in that sense. It does not “give all other alternatives a chance” before using force. Traditionally it does not see force as “the last resort,” or at least its thresholds for that standard are much lower than our own. If Israel has a good military option, it takes it. It doesn't warn. It doesn't debate, at least not in public.
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It strikes—and it typically succeeds when it does so.