Transcript 

Host: This is "On The Line,” and I'm Eric Felten. The United States and the European Union continue with a two-prong approach to dealing with Iran's nuclear program. Incentives are offered if Iran will only stop the production of enriched uranium, and sanctions are imposed as long as Iran continues to make the nuclear fuel which can be used to build nuclear bombs. Most recently, European nations hit Iran with a new round of economic sanctions, tightening restrictions on business and banking. Iran declared that the new sanctions are "illegal” and vowed to plow on with their nuclear program. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack says that, with a united diplomatic front, Western sanctions can work to resolve the nuclear standoff. 

McCormack: "Recently the actions of the EU, where they announced their intention to enforce new sanctions on Iran, as evidence that there is a great deal of concern and activity in the international system to get diplomacy to work, and that is where our focus is." 

Host: The threat of military action against Iran's nuclear program remains. Israel recently mounted a large military exercise with extensive aerial maneuvers, prompting speculation that Israel was rehearsing a possible air strike on Iran's nuclear infrastructure.  

McCormack: "We, ourselves, as you know and as we have conveyed to Israel as well as others in public and private, are focused on trying to make the diplomacy work. We believe that we can resolve the proximate issue at hand, which is the nuclear question, and which the Israeli government, I believe, sees as an existential threat, and that we can resolve these issues through diplomacy. We still hold out that hope."  

Host: What are the prospects for resolving the Iranian nuclear question with diplomacy? I'll ask my guests: Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council and author of the book “Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States”; and James Robbins, director of the Intelligence Center at Trinity Washington University. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. 

It was a little over two years ago in February of 2006 that U.S. President George Bush said, quote, “The nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons.” “Must” is a pretty strong term. Here we are two years and however many months later. Ilan Berman, how close are we to keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, as President Bush said must happen?  

Berman: Well, not very, frankly. What you're seeing is that there's a great deal of rhetoric with regard to the Bush administration's stance on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear capability. There's a good deal of rhetoric coming out of places like Paris and Berlin, as well. But the tools that U.S. and European leaders are throwing at the problem are simply ineffective. We have a series of sanctions that have now come down through the United Nations Security Council. We have additional sanctions that are happening multilaterally outside of the confines of the U.N. And they're geared towards preventing Iran or at least slowing Iran in its nuclear development. These sanctions are on their face ineffective. They're ineffective because they haven't been robust enough. They haven't been wide-reaching enough, and they really haven't convinced the Iranian regime that the benefits of coming to the negotiating table, of talking outweigh the benefits of nuclear acquisition. What Iran is telling us every time it rejects one of these deals, one of these offers of incentives and punishments is that it sees more benefit out of pursuing unilaterally its nuclear tract and perhaps weathering sanctions as a result than it does out of the negotiating with the West. And there is a recurring pattern that's happening here where for the last two years we've been engaging in this circular diplomacy and offering the Iranians essentially the same things, and their answer has been no and still no.  

Host: Jim Robbins, what is the benefit to Iran of a nuclear program that makes it so much more attractive than the easing of sanctions or the acceptance of various goodies packages that have been put on the table for Iran?  

Robbins: Well, with respect to goodies packages, I think that the greatest benefit that Iran currently is accruing is from high oil prices in the world. It's given the Iranians a great windfall in terms of being able to support their economy and being able to support whatever programs they want to enter into. So whether the international community can offer any kind of incentive, first Iranians would have to be hurting, which they are not doing. I think that at the strategic level, there's a great benefit for Iran in pursuing a nuclear-weapons program, not that they would admit it. But if they acquired a nuclear weapon, then they would essentially be bulletproof from any kind of future military action against them from any country that was interested in doing that, because then the deterrent threat of a response, a nuclear response, would be so much greater. So from the Iranian point of view, acquiring nuclear weapons is a wonderful insurance policy to maintain the continuance of their regime. And at the current time, they haven't really demonstrated to the Iranians that there's a downside to the pursuit of this, because every time the international community takes a little step, it doesn't really hurt the Iranian regime. So until it can be demonstrated to them that there are specific credible reasons for them not to pursue this program, I think that they will continue to do it.  

Host: Ilan Berman, given the regime-protecting effect that having nuclear weapons would entail, what sanctions or incentives would actually have any hope of changing that calculation if for the regime in Iran it's sort of an existential question? You get nuclear weapons, you're good to go.  

Berman: There's no question that -- I think Jim is exactly right. The Iranian regime has seized upon a nuclear program as the surefire way to preempt preemption. They think that they're fireproof the closer they come to the nuclear threshold. They've seen the model of Iraq, and by contrast, they've seen the model of North Korea, and they've decided that, “Thank you very much. We'd like to be very much like Pyongyang. We don't want to be like Baghdad.” And so I think the real center of gravity in any serious strategy has been first to divide and conquer, to have different conversations with the Iranian people than you do with the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime is sitting pretty. The Iranian people are not. They Iranian people are hurting economically. And they're also hurting economically as a result of the types of sanctions that the West is fielding. So having a conversation with them and explaining to them that the path pursued by their regime has adverse effects for them as a people, as a nation, as individuals. It is very important.  

Host: Now, where is that conversation, though? Because if you look at public opinion to the extent it can be expressed in Iran, there are lots of things that the Iranian people aren't happy about with their government. But the nuclear program isn't one of them. As much as this may be the source of sanctions that hurt the Iranian people, the nuclear program itself has successfully been pitched by the Iranian government to the Iranian people as a source of national pride.  

Berman: Oh, absolutely. And that's the key point. The key point is, first of all, that it's an issue in which there is synergy between the regime and the people, so we have to be careful of that. And the other point is that the regime has been able to play off of that empathy and essentially monopolize the dialogue. In Iran today, if you read Iranian papers, if you listen to Iranian television, you hear a lot about what the regime says the West is doing. The West is trying to prevent Iran from achieving greatness. "The West is trying to prevent our country from assuming its place at the great-powers table.” There's not a lot of discussion, certainly, on the part of the concrete economic detriments that are going to accrue to the Iranian people as a result of them being progressively shut out of world markets, having commodity prices go up, having an economy based on skyrocketing oil prices. All of these are very valid conversations to have, but the Iranian regime is not going to have it with them. So it's up to the United States, it's up the coalition to have that conversation and really telegraph to the Iranian people that, "Your regime is committed to this path, but you should understand that there are costs associated with it.”  

Host: Jim Robbins, are there enough costs to persuade Iranian people that it's a bad idea, and is that really, at this point, going to make any more difference to the pursuit of this program by the regime than anything else?  

Robbins: Whether the Iranian people have a say in it is a good question. Probably they don't. They do have a say in what the regime is. They're suffering twenty-five-percent inflation. They have, you know, increasing curtailments on their various freedoms, the freedoms that they have left. So on the political end of it, that's where we might see some change. With respect to the nuclear program, which both you and Ilan have observed, it is something that's a source of pride for the people. It's something that the regime tends to exploit to try to increase this level of pride in something where they're standing up to the West, standing up to the people who are trying to oppose them, at least in the regime's propaganda. So on that level, probably you're not going to have a means of influencing the regime. In terms of the people opposing the economic policies of the regime, in terms of opposing the social policies of the regime that don't allow people to, you know, express themselves in the way that they would like to in terms of increasing religious-based impositions on their daily life, that's the kind of thing that could create a destabilization inside the system. President Ahmadinejad is up for reelection next year. Maybe he will be reelected. Maybe he won't. Maybe they'll have a free election. Maybe not. There are various aspects of this that the coalition can look into apart from trying to attack this program directly, because I don't think that a direct approach on a diplomatic level is going to be as effective as some of the indirect approaches that could be used.  

Host: Let's talk about what options, whether it's indirect or direct, what options are still on the table or conceivably on the table for U.S. policy makers? You had, as we've said, two years ago President Bush saying that this must not happen, and now, when President Bush was in Europe, instead he was saying that with regard to the Iranian nuclear issue that he planned to, quote, "leave behind a multilateral framework to work on this issue.” Rather less robust statement on the problem. Is this an acknowledgement that in the last half-year of the Bush administration, that the Iranian nuclear issue is just going to be pushed down the road?

Berman: Well, I think the preference certainly is there to push it down the road, to kick the can down the road to the next administration, whatever composition it is. It's quite possible, given two things. Given the very rapid timetable that Iran has for nuclear acquisition, which is now as Mohamed El Baradei, the IAEA chief, said a couple of days ago, between six and twelve months. That's the one factor. The other factor is that there are other countries, for example such as Israel, that may do something about it. This may be an issue that the Bush administration does not have the luxury of leaving behind for its successor. All of which is to say that it pays good dividends to think very creatively now about the types of strategies that we have -- economic, diplomatic, even military -- to deal with the Iranian issue, ranging from facing down the Iranians over their nuclear program to confronting what they're doing in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. These are all linked issues. The nuclear issue is a catalyst of sorts that is enabling Iranian behavior on a number of fronts, and frankly I think it should be treated as such, and so it should be treated as such sooner rather than later.  

Host: Jim Robbins, this issue that Ilan Berman brings up of, for example, confronting Iran over what's happening in Iraq or in Afghanistan, we've had a lot of U.S. military officials coming out and showing Iranian-made, Iranian-delivered weapons that have been killing U.S. troops in Iraq. And then nothing comes of that. If anything, it appears that at this point, confronting Iran over what's going on in Iraq amounts to pointing out that Iran can get away even with facilitating the death of U.S. soldiers without consequences.  

Robbins: That's correct. Recently, there have been a few moves made towards interdicting Iranian intelligence and other assets that are operating inside Iraq, but this has been going on for a number of years now, either through Iranian-sanctioned groups, either Iraqis or Hezbollah also supplying weapons, as you noted. So, yes, the Iranians have been getting away with killing Americans for some years, and it's a little late in the game to try to make a big issue out of this. The current administration is in kind of its closing-out period in terms of foreign policy. The president is kind of making his farewell tours now, so it's unlikely that anything robust is going to be done by the United States. Israel is politically in a weakened position right now, so who knows what the Israelis might do? But it's a good time for the Iranians to try to make strides forward in their nuclear program because the country's most likely to take concerted action or military action against the Iranians who are currently weak. The speaker of the Iranian parliament recently said that if military action was taken against them that the West would find a fait accompli or a done deal, that would suggest that they already have the components ready to construct a nuclear weapon rapidly, which also contradicts earlier statements that they weren't doing this, but nevertheless it's a very good time strategically for the Iranians to push forward as rapidly as possible on this program, and that means it's a very dangerous time for everybody else.   

Host: Ilan Berman, how much time does Iran have to do what it needs to do? 

Host: And a centrifuge is a machine that separates out different components of uranium so that you can get the enriched part.