If there's anyone with a firm grasp of the mullahs' paranoia about regime change, it's Haleh Esfandiari. Jailed for eight months in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison for the crime of visiting her aged mother — surely a pretext for doing State Department reconnaissance — Esfandiari is that rara avis of an Iranian-American, one who has an intimate knowledge of both countries' power structures. (She's director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which didn't help her at customs in Tehran.)
Her advice is that the U.S. should stop funding Iranian NGOs since that only makes it harder for them to go about their business:
The intractable realities in the diplomatic arena and on the ground in Iran call for a change of approach to one that would reverse the current focus of U.S. policy: Governments should talk to governments, while Iranian and American NGO's should be permitted to interact in a transparent fashion without the intrusion of governments. If the United States is to have any chance of enlisting Iranian cooperation on issues of major concern — stabilizing Iraq and resolving the nuclear impasse — it must make clear that its objective is a change in Iranian behavior, not a change of regime. That would shift the onus to Tehran and force its multiple power centers to confront the consequences of Ahmadinejad's policies for Iranian interests. Although such a U.S. assurance is no guarantee of success, it is the prerequisite for a change in Iranian foreign-policy behavior, as well as for positioning the United States to win multilateral support for meaningful action at the United Nations if Iranian intransigence continues.
The problem with this recommendation is that it, too, is premised on the desirability of "velvet revolution" in Iran. By letting NGOs alone, Esfandiari argues, they'll be better able to do exactly what the U.S. wants: destabilize the regime. Will the Iranians fail to see through this gambit of what I'll call positive neglect? To the totalitarian, all strategies of an opponent — whether that opponent be real or imagined — are suspect and worthy of counteracting with feverish, far-reaching methods. Iranian NGOs will not go unpunished just because they're free of the largess of the United States.
I don't see why we couldn't have it both ways: Engage the mullahs diplomatically and also continue a $75 million program to aid their opponents. The argument that Iran must be dealt with lightly because it continues to abet terrorism in Iraq is valid. But given that the Shia parties in control of the Iraqi government are more interested in nationalism than they are in becoming a satrapy of the Islamic Republic, Iran's influence next door will likely diminish anyway–with or without a continued American troop presence. (If it doesn't, then Iran's takeover of Iraq is an inevitability, which frees us to act even more liberally with respect to funding its opposition.)
We adopted the same mailed-glove handshake policy during the cold war when the Soviets were likewise funding forces responsible for U.S. military casualties in Korea and Vietnam. Given that Iran represents an even greater danger in the age of sacred nukes, why should we act any differently?
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