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COMMENTARY
November 30, 2011
Hit & run
Diplomacy isn't fun any more, especially in the Middle East. Ask anyone working for the British embassy in Tehran, which, together with its compound elsewhere in the city, was ransacked this week by (obviously government-directed) "hard line" mobs. This, just as the Iranian Majlis was voting to condemn Britain's imposition of (mild) financial sanctions, its members shouting "Death to England," and other phrases suggesting neither sobriety nor deliberation.We are in the fourth decade of Iran's crackerjack, schizoid, apostate Shia regime. They would have nuclear weapons by now, almost certainly, were it not for Stuxnet attacks, other bespoke malware, huge implausible industrial accidents, and mysterious hits on their leading nuclear scientists. (If I knew who was doing this, I wouldn't tell.) Sanctions, by contrast, are merely inconvenient. For all practical purposes, the ayatollahs have Vladimir Putin's Russia to render them immune from the effects of any western sanctions. Since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy, I have been unable to understand why any allied government would send a formal diplomatic mission into Iran, let alone leave one there. This is a question less of "principle" than of safety, though, in the case of diplomacy, the two are closely related. That occupation lasted a full year and ended only when the ayatollahs had assessed the prospects of a Reagan presidency. The regime didn't apologize, nor since has given any indication it would begin to cultivate "normal," ever. There have been no guarantees, and the casual way in which the riot police went about defending that British embassy (a show on live state television) is only the latest example in an interminable series of publicly performed lawless acts. Kidnappings and similar molestations have been, not just often, but habitually practised on foreign nationals. The rest of Iran's repertoire is documented. Those needing to speak to an ayatollah can use the phone. There were anyway foreign-interest sections in the Swiss embassy. And, while this may sound facetious, it is important not only for safety, but also in principle to behave toward lawless regimes as one might towards the more dangerous animals in the wild. For starters, you don't negotiate with them. Why? Because the civilized world has, and has always had, a survival interest in maintaining the weight not only of formal international law, but also of unwritten humane and civilized conventions. Where these cease to be recognized, we draw a "line in the sand." Alas, this has been lost on postmodern, hyper-relativist, multi-culturalized, "liberal" man. We have outwardly sane people proposing to negotiate even with the Taliban. Indeed, actually negotiating behind the scenes, and in Afghanistan, getting themselves suicide-bombed as their reward. They make the mistake of assuming that there can be common interests between sides, when the only interest we share with the enemy is his desire for "martyrdom." It actually makes more sense to abandon a country to a force like the Taliban - or like the Revolutionary Council of Iran - than reduce ourselves to negotiating with them, though the best option will always be: destroy them. In their different ways, both the Bush and Obama administrations have tried to "engage." The Bush engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq were fully serious: Send in the Marines, remove the regime, occupy the country. Then mop up as thoroughly as possible. The subsequent attempts to build "new democracies" could perhaps have been omitted. A standing army costs a lot to maintain, and the subsequent aid programs cost even more. The exercise proved so extravagant - and politically, so insupportable - that we lost both the initiative and our will. (As Machiavelli says, when you must do something nasty, get it over quickly.) By force of this experience, not only the Obama administration, but the entire West is also moving away from "constructive engagement" towards something more purely destructive. We are sliding into an alternative policy of "hit and run." I used the indefinite article, for there are many ways to do hit and run. The way we are adopting may be the stupidest. It is not proactive, but reactive; we wait until something appalling is happening, then send NATO through the sky. The closest the U.S. gets to pro-action is in drone attacks, on known terrorist kingpins, but those, too, are determined by exigencies of U.S. domestic politics. They are colourful acts of vengeance, but not a strategy. Mental clarity is needed, to achieve any task. In this one, clarity begins as Bush put it: "You are either with us or against us." If the latter, negotiations may be taken off the table and, to the enemy's surprise, swept from under the table, too. Replace with: "You do this, we do that." A country that will not behave according to diplomatic and civilized norms, should be walled. It is, after all, in a state of war with you. Get your nationals out, withdraw state recognition and start calculating the most effective and least costly way (alike in blood and treasure) to render that regime harmless. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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