Mick Hartley

Michael Young, opinion editor of Lebanon’s Daily Star, on the futility of dialogue with Tehran:

The Iranian’s are playing three-dimensional chess in the Middle East, while the U.S. is playing with its hankie. American policy in the region suffers from a lack of ideas. The administration’s disorientation after the release of the NIE report showed that in the absence of a war option (and an unpersuasive war option at that), the U.S. remains unsure what to do about Iran. But the Democrats are equally at sea. Even administration critic Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council adviser on the Middle East, admitted recently that “[r]egrettably, opposition Democrats are not defining a genuine alternative. Beyond criticism of President Bush’s ‘saber rattling,’ Democratic presidential candidates offer, for the most part, only vacuous rhetoric about ‘engaging’ Iran.”

For example, what is the U.S. doing about Iran’s alliance with Syria, and their joint patronage of Hamas and Hizbullah? Hamas is dead set on wrecking American efforts to bring about a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and several months ago the movement mounted a successful coup against the Fatah movement in Gaza. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in Damascus, is a frequent visitor to Tehran, and although Syria will send sporadic signals that it is displeased with the Islamist group, this is chaff designed to keep alive the illusion that Syria and Iran are on different wavelengths. Nothing will divide Syria from Iran when the relationship brings so many foreign supplicants to Damascus with offers of concessions to President Bashar Assad, if only he would consider abandoning Iran. Assad takes the concessions, offers none of his own, and yet the visitors still keep coming.

Similarly, Iran and Syria are putting on a “good cop, bad cop” routine in Lebanon. Damascus is steadily re-imposing its hegemony over its smaller neighbor, neutralizing or assassinating those who oppose a Syrian return. Iran is backing Syria up because Hizbullah will benefit. The Shiite group knows that the stabilization of Lebanon under a sovereign government would force it to surrender its weapons; and without weapons Hizbullah would cease to be Hizbullah. Iran needs the party and its arms to sustain its influence in the Levant, as well as to preserve a deterrence capability at Israel’s doorstep. Damascus, in turn, needs Hizbullah to intimidate Syria’s Lebanese foes. The Iranians are proving almost as instrumental as the Syrians in reversing the gains of the 2005 Cedar Revolution. […]

So, how does a dialogue look now? Iran would gladly draw the U.S. into a lengthy discussion of everything and nothing, and use this empty gabfest as a smokescreen to advance its agenda. But diplomacy is not an end in itself; to be meaningful it has to achieve specific aims and be based on confidence that both sides seek a mutually advantageous deal. Nothing suggests the Iranians have reached that stage yet.

That’s because Iran believes it is winning in the region. The U.S. seems unable to deploy the same array of foreign policy instruments as the Iranians, even if it is vastly more powerful; America’s principal Arab allies are anemic, their mostly geriatric regimes illegitimate; and America’s attention span abroad often seems so limited that an adversary’s favored tactic is to just wait until its officials lose interest and head for the lecture circuit. The Iranians are right, they are winning; at least for the time being.