Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Reagan and the Iran talks



by Elliott Abrams



In his address to the U.N. General Assembly in September 1987, U.S. President Ronald ‎Reagan spoke a few words about the relationship between peace and freedom:‎

"Freedom in Nicaragua or Angola or Afghanistan or Cambodia or Eastern Europe or ‎South Africa or any place else on the globe is not just an internal matter. Some time ‎ago the Czech dissident writer Vaclav Havel warned the world that 'respect for ‎human rights is the fundamental condition and the sole genuine guarantee of true ‎peace.' And Andrei Sakharov in his Nobel lecture said: 'I am convinced that ‎international confidence, mutual understanding, disarmament, and international ‎security are inconceivable without an open society with freedom of information, ‎freedom of conscience, the right to publish, and the right to travel and choose the ‎country in which one wishes to live.' Freedom serves peace; the quest for peace ‎must serve the cause of freedom. Patient diplomacy can contribute to a world in ‎which both can flourish.‎"

This is a message worth keeping in mind as our negotiators, and those of other ‎‎P5+1 nations, meet with Iranian officials to seek a nuclear agreement before the ‎July 20 deadline. The road to peace does not lie through weak agreements with ‎brutal dictatorships. In the end, peace and reconciliation between Iran and the ‎United States are certainly possible, indeed likely -- but not between the Islamic republic and the United States.

"The quest for peace must serve the cause of ‎freedom," Reagan rightly said, and any agreement that strengthens the Iranian ‎regime -- that enhances its reputation, that gives it greater leverage in the Middle ‎East, or that strengthens its stranglehold on the Iranian people -- serves neither the ‎cause of freedom nor that of peace.‎

I've heard Obama administration officials claim they were following a Reagan-like ‎policy toward Iran, negotiating with a hostile power just as he negotiated with the ‎Soviet Union. But Reagan didn't just negotiate; he negotiated and he denounced. He ‎called the USSR an "evil empire" that would end up on the "ash heap of history." His ‎moral clarity was powerful -- powerful enough, Natan Sharansky later wrote, to reach ‎into the Gulag. Here's how Sharansky saw it:‎

"It was the great brilliant moment when we learned that Ronald Reagan had ‎proclaimed the Soviet Union an Evil Empire before the entire world. There was a ‎long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for ‎daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story ‎about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark ‎days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. ‎Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell's Newspeak was dead. ‎President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West ‎to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union.‎

"It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all ‎instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, ‎and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold ‎now. This was the end of Lenin's 'Great October Bolshevik Revolution' and the ‎beginning of a new revolution, a freedom revolution -- Reagan's Revolution.‎

"We were all in and out of punishment cells so often -- me more than most -- that we ‎developed our own tapping language to communicate with each other between the ‎walls. A secret code. We had to develop new communication methods to pass on this ‎great, impossible news.‎"

There has been no such moment in the Obama administration, which has been ‎chasing the dream of a rapprochement with the Islamic republic. This is a morally ‎ambiguous policy at best, but it is also impractical and counterproductive. This is ‎true both in Congress, where many critics (in both parties) fear a weak Obama policy ‎toward Iran, one searching desperately for an agreement that might be proffered as ‎a great foreign policy achievement, and in the region, where our Gulf Arab allies and ‎Israel all fear a nuclear deal that leads to greatly reduced American resistance to ‎Iranian aggression, subversion, and support for terrorism. 

Stronger and clearer ‎rhetoric about the crimes of the Islamic republic would reassure members of ‎Congress and U.S. allies in the region -- and would make a nuclear deal more likely to ‎pass muster on Capitol Hill. Ironically it would also make it more likely that a decent ‎deal, if one could be negotiated, would be accepted by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, for ‎whom rapprochement with the "Great Satan" is a nightmare, not an objective. Put ‎another way, a tougher American stance toward the Islamic republic will not lead ‎Khamenei to back away from a nuclear deal; he seeks no close or cooperative ‎relationship.‎

Nothing we do with respect to Iran should deepen the regime's hold, and we should ‎be trying in any practical way we have -- improving Internet access for Iranians, for ‎example, and making very clear in our rhetoric that we understand the brutal nature ‎of the regime's repression -- to side with the people of Iran against their oppressors. ‎To repeat what Reagan said for yet another time, "The quest for peace must serve ‎the cause of freedom."‎



Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This piece can be found on Abrams' blog "Pressure Points."

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=8947

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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