July 21, 2013
Going
to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran. By Flynt Leverett and
Hillary Mann Leverett. Metropolitan Books, 2013. 496 pp.
I vividly recall the excitement
those of us in Chicago’s No War on Iran Coalition felt in October 2007 when Esquire published a profile—as
the teaser text read—of two “former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush
administration [who] say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for
years, despite claiming otherwise.” It was one of those moments that
left-wingers revel in, when figures from inside the national security apparatus
come out of the woodwork and echo what those of us agitating on the outside
have been saying, but with a gravitas and on a stage that antiwar voices can
only dream of having.
The Leveretts were consummate
insiders; both had served in the State Department as well as on the National
Security Council, and Flynt also had been a senior analyst at the Central
Intelligence Agency. Richard N. Haass, a pillar of the American foreign policy
establishment (currently president of the Council on Foreign Relations), was
the best man at their wedding. They had left the George W. Bush administration
in 2003 “because of disagreements over Middle East policy and the conduct of
the war on terror,” as Flynt reports on his website. Like many realists, they
had locked horns with the administration’s increasingly belligerent neocon
faction. On Iran, they had become outspoken critics of the warpath the
administration seemed to be on; a course they warned was cataclysmic.
The Esquire article went viral in
antiwar circles. The leftosphere ate it up. I printed out several copies of it
to hand out at meetings of our group. The Leveretts provided intellectual
catnip for those of us arguing and organizing against a U.S. attack on Iran,
which in that final year or so of the Bush era felt like a very real prospect.
Less than two years later, the
Washington power couple made waves of a very different sort, and alienated many
of their erstwhile admirers. In the summer of 2009, with millions of Iranians
on the streets—initially to protest what they believed to be a stolen election,
but subsequently to decry the violent repression with which the first wave of
notably peaceful demonstrations were met—the Leveretts went to bat for the
Islamic Republic. On June 15, the day that roughly a million Iranians held a
silent rally in Azadi (Freedom) Square in Tehran, the Leveretts published an
op-ed article in Politico with the title “Ahmadinejad won. Get
over it.” This became their hobby horse for the next several years. Like
battering rams, the Leveretts dismissed any and all suspicions about the
authenticity of the 2009 election results as baseless. And they went much
further, painting a fawning, romantic portrait of the Islamic
Republic—especially of its most hardline, reactionary elements—and heaped scorn
on Iran’s Green Movement, and seemingly anyone who expressed support for it.
The label “pro-Green” became a term of abuse in their polemics, as if to
disqualify the views of anyone sympathetic to the movement.
Going to Tehran could have been a major
contribution to the very important debate regarding the future of American
policy toward Iran. Indeed, with their pedigrees in the national security
establishment, the Leveretts are ideally positioned to champion the case for
normalizing relations between the United States and Iran—a case that
desperately needs to be both made and heard in Washington. Lamentably, their
ideological contortions get in the way and derail the effort.
To be sure, the book is not without its strengths. The
penultimate chapter, “Iran and America’s Imperial Turn,” offers a trenchant and
valuable critique of the follies and failures of U.S. policy toward Iran going
back three decades. The concluding chapter, “The Road to Tehran,” advances a
bold proposal for realigning Washington’s relations with Tehran. The Leveretts
revisit Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China, an overture that
dramatically recast Sino-American relations. It is a story, they contend, that
“offers valuable insights into how the United States might finally break out of
its Iran policy straightjacket.” Indeed, they consider this “Nixonian moment”
the “greatest achievement of American diplomacy in the past half century,” and
call for a new Shanghai Communiqué that would set U.S.-Iran relations on the
path to rapprochement, which, they argue, would benefit American strategic
interests in much the way Nixon’s China breakthrough did.
This argument is compelling and refreshing. It seems
especially relevant with the election in June of Hassan Rowhani as Iran’s
president. There is widespread hope in Western circles (and indeed in Iran)
that if ever there was a moment for a breakthrough in the tormented
relationship between Washington and Tehran, this is it. Not since the period
from 1997 to 2000, when Mohammad Khatami and Bill Clinton overlapped, have both
countries had liberal/moderate/reformist presidents at the same time. With
George W. Bush’s ascension to the White House in January 2001, there was a
hardliner in Washington and a reformist in Tehran; until Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
became president in 2005. That evened the score with reactionaries in both
capitals, until 2008, when Barack Obama’s election put a liberal in the White
House, but a hardline counterpart remained in office in Tehran. With the
election of Rowhani, who is more of a moderate/conservative pragmatist than a
reformist, but one very much in debt to the reformist camp, there is a genuine
chance for something akin to the Shanghai Communiqué.
Also valuable is their analysis of the thwarting of the
Tehran Declaration in 2010. Turkey and Brazil worked out an arrangement with
Iran—at Obama’s direction—aimed at resolving the standoff over Iran’s nuclear
program. Turkish and Brazilian officials got Iran to agree to a nuclear fuel
swap deal. The deal, the Leveretts point out, “met all of the American
president’s conditions” as outlined in letters Obama sent to Turkish Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva. The negotiations, according to Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso
Amorim, “followed precisely the script that had been on the table for some
months and whose validity had been recently reaffirmed at the highest level.”
Yet Washington immediately rejected the deal that Turkey and Brazil had pursued
at its urging and introduced a new United Nations Security Council sanctions
resolution.
Erdoğan and Lula, write the Leveretts, “came to believe that,
in reality, they had been set up to fail.” Their “main offense, from an
American perspective, was that they had gone to Tehran and succeeded in
brokering a deal.” Amorim and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu warned that squandering the
opportunity that the Tehran Declaration presented “may well be regretted for
generations to come.” Not only was this a failure to make progress on the
Iranian nuclear standoff, it was a slap in the face to Turkey and Brazil, U.S.
allies, and emerging powers on the global stage. The Leveretts are correct in
viewing this affair as a blown opportunity conducted in bad faith.
But the Leveretts get it badly wrong
when they go out of their way and expend considerable effort not only to
portray the Islamic Republic in the most flattering terms, but to disparage
Iranian dissidents and trash the democratic Green Movement. They claim to be
merely describing Iranian political realities in calm, sober terms, providing a
corrective to the “wishful thinking” about Iran that they believe prevails in
Washington. But it’s clear from Going to Tehran and their other writings
that the Leveretts have taken sides in Iran’s internal political battle—with
the regime’s most reactionary elements, and against the country’s human rights
activists, dissident intellectuals and journalists, trade unionists, and
women’s rights activists.
Part Two of the book, “The Islamic
Republic as Legitimate State,” concludes with sections titled “Canonizing the
Green Movement” and “Beyond the Green Movement.” The Leveretts treat sermons
and statements by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with breathless
reverence while taking Green Movement leader Mir-Hossein Moussavi to task for
being too defiant of Khamenei. They regard Khamenei’s judgments as “wholly
appropriate,” but say that Moussavi “damaged his credibility,” that turnout for
Green protests was “embarrassingly low,” and the movement is in “intellectual
disarray” and lacking “a coherent agenda.” The widely documented repression
unleashed on nonviolent demonstrators in 2009 and 2010—brutal beatings,
killings, mass arrests, torture and rape of women and men—was, in their eyes,
“relatively restrained” and “should be considered in the context of Iran’s
history.” They dismiss claims that there was a “bloody crackdown” as “caricatures.”
The Leveretts regard themselves as
realists. Their explicitly Nixonian argument for a new American approach to
Iran along the lines of the Shanghai Communiqué is pure realpolitik—they
advocate rapprochement because they believe it is in America’s strategic
interests. But their approach to Iran’s domestic politics—their partisan
support for one faction over another—is decidedly un-realist. From a realist
point of view, the internal politics of other countries are irrelevant—what
matters is not the form of government or domestic arrangements of other
countries but their strategic interests and how they go about advancing them in
the international arena. Realists don’t grant importance to the internal
political affairs of other countries, let alone take sides in them, as the
Leveretts brazenly do with Iran.
Why do the Nixonian Leveretts make this very un-realist
move? Because the demonization of the Islamic Republic and the “canonization”
of the Green Movement, in their view, have “weakened support among Western
elites and publics for diplomatic engagement with Tehran.” Their
counter-narrative of a legitimate—indeed vibrant and democratic—Islamic
Republic, and an incoherent and unpopular Green opposition, is thus designed to
bolster the case for rapprochement.
This concern has some merit. The upheaval following the
June 2009 election in Iran did have a chilling effect on the prospects for
diplomatic progress. It was difficult to pursue diplomacy with the Islamic
Republic amidst its biggest, bloodiest crackdown in twenty years. Even Trita
Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and one of the
leading advocates of diplomatic engagement with Tehran, called for a “tactical
pause” during the thick of the repression in the summer of 2009.
But there is no contradiction between advocating
rapprochement between the two countries and denouncing the Islamic Republic’s
human rights violations. Indeed the Green Movement itself has long supported
normalization of relations between Washington and Tehran. In fact, an end to
the longstanding hostilities between the two countries would benefit Iran’s
democratic opposition. Washington’s saber-rattling has long been a lifeline to
Iran’s hardliners, allowing them to justify their repressive measures as necessary
to defend the Iranian people against the enemy at the gates. Without that
external threat, Iran’s democratic movement would have more breathing space.
To the extent that Western opponents
of diplomatic engagement with Iran invoke the Islamic Republic’s repression or
human rights record, they are wrong—and out of step with the Green Movement,
which, despite its own suffering at the hands of Iran’s repressive state
apparatus, wants to see U.S.-Iran relations improved. These are separate
issues—the United States should pursue a new Iran policy, and the Islamic
Republic’s repression should be opposed (though I agree with the Leveretts that
the United States is not the right messenger for this message—that’s the place
of global civil society, not foreign governments). The Leveretts aren’t amiss
in advocating rapprochement, or in worrying about its prospects being undercut
by misplaced arguments about human rights. But they are dead wrong to whitewash
the Islamic Republic and to disparage its domestic opponents. If anything,
those of us who strongly support diplomatic engagement and resetting U.S.
policy toward Iran will have to disassociate that position from the Leveretts,
who have freighted it with their tortured logic.
Danny Postel is the associate director of the Center for
Middle East Studies in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the
University of Denver. He is the author of Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of
Liberalism, and co-editor of The
People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future and The
Syria Dilemma. He is a contributing editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture, and previously a senior editor of openDemocracy. He blogs for Truthout, Critical Inquiry, and Huffington Post. On Twitter: @dannypostel.