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02/28/2004 Archived Entry: "Going Soft on Iran"

Posted by steve @ 03:55 PM EST [Link]

ARE THE REALISTS EVER REALISTIC?: Reuel Marc Gerecht has an interesting piece in an upcoming Weekly Standard about foreign policy 'realists' who say that the West can deal with the 'pragmatic' conservatives now in charge in Iran.

According to many American "realists"--the school of foreign policy most often associated with such men as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, former diplomats James Baker, Richard Murphy, Thomas Pickering, and Richard Haass, and institutions like the Nixon Center and the Council on Foreign Relations--there may be a silver lining in the bad news. Iran's "hard-liners" may in fact be "pragmatic conservatives," to borrow a phrase often heard now in the colloquies of Washington's think tanks where the intellectual laborers of American realism are trying to devise a new strategy for Iran and the Greater Middle East. In the post-9/11 world, the fear of weapons of mass destruction in the wrong
hands dominates public policy debates, and a growing number of American realists believe that Iran's "pragmatic mullahs"--in Persian translation, this means former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the major-domo of the clerical establishment, and Ali Khamenei, the "spiritual leader" of the country--are the men to cut a deal to halt Iran's WMD programs.

Read on.