Blowback vs. Backdown
Senator Graham of South Carolina, most melodiously among a frog chorus of others, has accused President Obama of weakness in the face of ongoing Iranian Human Rights abuses calculated to silence protests against the recent disputed election. President Obama has gone so far as to strengthen the language of disapproval he uses when adressing the crackdown, but insists that he will not play into Iranian designs to portray the protest movement as a CIA-orchestrated coup like the one that deposed Mossadeq in 1953. Some already see American involvement: Seymour Hirsch has been reporting about secret operations in Iran for years, bombs have been going off in the hinterlands, and why all of the sudden does the international community expect democracy in a country ruled for decades by a ruthless theocracy wearing a republican fig leaf? In any event, assume we aren't yet involved. Who is right? Are we losing a historic opportunity to openly support reform in Iran, or do we have sanity in American foreign relations at last?
It is unclear. What have we gained for ourselves or the opposition within Iran through restraint? The Anti-Reformists seem to have largely succeeded in silencing both the foreign media and domestic dissent within the range of their power, which is all they seem concerned about. They certainly don't seem concerned about world opinion. Who is surprised by this? Their chief strategy for gaining the respect of the international community continues to appear to be to reach in the direction of a nuclear weapon while insisting they don't want to use one like a man who has a gun drawn on him reaching for a gun of his own while insisting he is only stretching. It is no secret that Iranian agents and allies have sworn to kill Americans and Jews wherever they can get away with it, from truck-bombing Marine Peace-Keeping Force Barracks in Beirut to demolishing Jewish Community Centers in South America. The fact that a majority of Iranians anecdotally appreciate American culture or statistically don't self-identify as anti-semitic is beside the point: it is not that majority which holds power. Furthermore, the Iranian government has blamed the unrest on American and British agents anyway. What would it have mattered if Obama had said instantly and loudly, "The legitimacy of the government in Iran is in question, and we cannot negotiate with an illigitmate government. So allow the protests and hold a full and public inquiry into election irregularities or lose the chance to negotiate with the United States completely . . ."? Or why not go further? Why shouldn't we actively work to change the regime in Iran?
Well, for one, if the effort fails, and it probably would, we lose the chance to talk with Iran directly. "Legitimate" or not, the government of Iran must be offered diplomacy, or the consequences of exercising the military option in the future could be their own disaster. Simply put: we must at least try to negotiate directly. We cannot rely on Europe as a proxy to do so. We have already tried, but the European diplomats know full well that a Nuclear weapon may be a threat to Israel, it may be a threat to America or even possibly Britain. But these countries, with weak militaries and large, unassimilated muslim populations don't really believe that it's worth going to war over a weapon that the Iranians don't yet have and will almost certainly never use against the Eurpoean continent. In addition, while we do less than a tenth of a billion dollars worth of business with Iran annually, European countries as a body do billions and billions of dollars worth of business with Iran, business they don't want to lose. Even assuming Iran could be intimidated or cajoled, Europe does not have the motivation, let alone the stomach, to do the heavy lifting of redirection. If we want to convince them that a nuclear weapon means war, we will have to do it ourselves. And we can't do that if we cut them off.
Secondly, by being more circumspect, we do acknowledge one . . . one . . . of the many unfortunate decisions our government made during the cold war, with a view to convincing the world we intend to behave differently now:
In Daniel Yergin's brilliant history of the petroleum industry, "The Prize" the arc of the tale is roughly this: Western Corporate development and domination of the international oil business slowly curves to the developing nations' assertions of sovereignty at the former's expense. The book ends with the stage having been set for the world we now live in: multiple poles of influence and power competing with each other for increasingly valuable reserves. The climax of the tale, the turning point, is the ouster of democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadeq in Iran by agents and allies of the United States on behalf of largely British beneficiaries.
This episode is so crucial to Yergin's tale, and to us today, for three reasons.
1) The coup was the most important instance of the failure of Western Corporate Patronage whose model had been established in Saudi Arabia: no deal could be sweet enough for Mossadeq to sell over control of Iran's most valuable resource to foreign interests. The companies, who felt that they had done the hard work of discovering and developing the resources were loathe to sit idly by and watch a country on the southern border of the Soviet Union nationalize their investments. Whatever their reasoning, the coup was the moment when it became clear that business acumen alone would not be able to maintain Western Corporate control of oil.
2) The coup was clear evidence that the United States -- despite being willing to defy allies like Israel, France and Britain over the Suez Canal, forcing them to accept humiliating withdrawal rather than accept the re-establishment of pre-Second World War Imperialism -- was not the altruistic actor it wanted to present itself as when resources and relationships it considered "vital" were at stake.
3) The coup sowed the seeds of the "Blowback" that would come to present the most serious challenge to American security in our lifetimes: Radical Islam. The coup which installed the Shah, along with Pinochet's coup in Chile, became exhibit A in the case against American hegemony, and some would even draw a straight line between August 22, 1953 and September 11, 2001. Enlightened foreign policy has as one of its stated goals, the minimization of "blowback."
So the real question is this: is acting on behalf of the protesters in Iran worth the blowback?
Chalmers Johnson, who worked for the agency, has become famous and celebrated for his candid criticism of the CIA. His book Blowback, restated the simple real-politik principle that for every action the United States takes in its own interests, those whose will we frustrate (or lives we ruin) in the process become enemies and do unto us all the things enemies do. The prescription is for the U.S. to radically disengage from unethical situations it finds itself supporting -- if not actively creating -- and accept the conseqences. Not only is this easier said than done, but it seems to take a rather rosy view of what our enemies are capable of. Nevertheless, the idea is that America must eat some crow and climb down. But climb down how far? How many of our interests should be abandoned? Does the fact that we behaved unethically in Iran in the past mean we are disqualified from pursuing reasonable goals there now?
The Left, as William F. Buckley sardonically noted in a debate with Noam Chomsky, is always previously aggreived, which pardons their offenses. Every unethical act the Communists commited in Viet Nam was predicated on, if not neccesitated by, a previous crime of Yankee Capitalist Imperialism, and European Imperialism before that, so on and so forth, on back, presumably, to Cain's murder of Abel. Similarly, in today's world, if you believe our detractors, there is literally no significant problem or injustice that cannot be laid at our doorstep. It is all our fault. And payback, as they say, is a bitch. Consequently there are many voices on the left who want to see radical American disengagement from any commitments viewed as ethically compromised, which is all of them.
This is not wise. Apart from delivering large parts of the Middle East and South West Asia directly into the hands of radical Islamism, leaving Africa and South East Asia to the utterly amoral designs of China, and abandoning the Balkans, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus to brutal Russian domination, radical disengagement would certainly mean betraying a vast array of clients and allies, many of whom actually believe our rhetoric, not to mention plunging the world economy, volatile at the best of times, into a new alignment in which "recovery" would become a matter of philosophically accepting a way of life most people in America now call poverty.
Obama is not going to do that.
But he is, apparently, going to tacitly acknowledge the limits of American power by keeping the door open to pursuing diplomacy with a brutal regime. As difficult as that is to swallow, it is the new face of Enlightened American Foreign Policy I for one wanted to see. Here it is. It better work.
