Former New York Times staffer Laura Secor writes in the New Republic today, urging the Obama administration to go a step further toward accommodating the government of Iran.
Secor, who has recently spent most of her time writing about the democracy movement in Iran, believes the mullahs are basically a pragmatic bunch whose main concern is survival of their regime. She faults the Bush administration for failing to appreciate that Iran’s just deigning to talk to the U.S. is an enormous concession. America, she contends, ought to pay in advance for this — preferably with a guarantee not to overthrow or interfere with the tyrannical overlords of the Islamic Republic.
Secor is right when she says that fanning hatred for the U.S. and Israel is a core value for the Iranians: asking Tehran to give it up just for the privilege of being Washington’s diplomatic partner is unrealistic. But the problem with her whole approach is that even if one accepts that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (never mentioned once in Secor’s piece) and the Islamist clerics he serves care most about their own survival (a point that is highly debatable given the apocalyptic nature of the religious beliefs motivating them), it is far from clear that ensuring the longevity of this tyrannical regime is in the West’s long-term interests.
Secor wants Obama to square the circle by somehow appeasing Iran’s leadership without sacrificing America’s support for the fragile human-rights and democracy movement in Iran. Good luck with that impossible task. As with Hillary Clinton’s permissiveness in regard to Chinese human-rights abuses, there’s little doubt that Obama’s commitment to engagement with Iran will trump any concern for human rights there.
It is also telling that not once in her article does Secor mention Iran’s nuclear program. Iran’s nuclear ambition is an existential threat to the State of Israel as well as a source of destabilization throughout the entire Middle East. If, as now seems likely, Obama isn’t going to act in mobilizing the West to impose serious sanctions on Iran, such policy will be popular in a Europe always uninterested in addressing this peril. The international “sigh of relief,” which Secor describes as the reaction to President Obama’s overture to Iran last month, represents the clear disinterest in the nuclear issue on the part of the international community. Analogies to the West’s early appeasement of Hitler are always perilous, but it’s hard to read about the “relief” over America’s new solicitousness without thinking of the earlier sense of relief that greeted Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich in 1938. Let’s pray this time the price of such momentary comfort won’t be as high.
