WorldView:Ever since the revised US National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 was published in early December, the prospect that the US and/or Israel might mount a military strike against Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities has been completely discounted at home and abroad.
Hillary Clinton does not have to worry about being so pre-empted in April or May, forcing her to approve or disapprove. Barack Obama supports engaging Iran in talks, while John McCain favours confronting the Iranians directly with sanctions and military means if necessary.
There is some concern that Iran has been let too easily off the hook as the world awaits a new US president. This week the Economist asked: "Has Iran won?", tentatively concluding it has. Worries about its military capacities and intentions were stoked by the test of a space rocket this week on the anniversary of the 1979 revolution, which attracted unfavourable comment even from Russian and Chinese officials.
Without the threat of a military attack, the Bush administration's policy of containing Iran rather than engaging it diplomatically and politically looks less and less convincing. Last summer and autumn a grand strategy of containment based on the cold war model applied to the Soviet Union was put in place.
The basic assumption is that Iran is an expansionist power with a messianic Shia Islamist ideology. It is determined to overthrow the regional order. To counter that threat Washington constructed a defensive/offensive edifice including: a strong naval presence in the Persian Gulf; major new arms deals with conservative Arab regimes; a push for more extended economic sanctions against Iran; a drumbeat of warnings on Iranian-sponsored terrorism in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza; and regional incentives to secure an Israeli-Palestinian agreement this year marginalising Iran's assumed proxies Hamas and Hizbullah.
Removing the capstone of a possible military strike deprives this strategy of an essential disciplinary element at least and of a plausible culmination to a systematic Iranian refusal to comply at most. Departed Bush administration hardliners like John Bolton still fulminate (as in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal) about an intelligence coup last December. They say intelligence has been politicised (as if it were ever anything but), that the estimate as published is contradictory or minimalist and that Iran remains a critical challenge for US plans to assert its dominance in the Middle East and ensure Israel's prowess there.
Their realist and radical opponents display an understandable schadenfreude after the intolerant neoconservative years, and they question several basic containment assumptions. Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine, regional specialists Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh say: "Iran is not, in fact, seeking to create disorder in order to fulfil some scriptural promise, nor is it an expansionist power with unquenchable ambitions. Not unlike Russia and China, Iran is a growing power seeking to become a pivotal state in its region."
Further, the lines of Shia and Sunni allegiance in the region are not the same as the anti-communist attitudes during the cold war, thereby undermining the strategy of mobilising Arab states. These are concerned about Iran/Shia influence in Lebanon with Hizbullah, but their Sunni sympathies do not extend to the Shia-influenced Iraqi government. "Washington's containment wall will therefore have to run right through Iraq and so inevitably destabilise the country as it becomes the frontline of the US-Iranian confrontation," they write. The same consideration affects other criss-crossing lines of political influence, as in the Iranian help for the Sunni Hamas movement in Gaza and the more general sympathy felt on the Sunni Arab street for Iran's confrontation with the US. Nasr and Takeyh conclude, in a devastating critique of the containment approach, that "it will only help erect Sunni extremism as an ideological barrier to Shiite Iran . . . Containing Iran today would mean promoting Sunni extremism - a self-defeating proposition for Washington."
Escaping from the containment mindset allows one to see two of the major factors driving these confrontations: the danger of Sunni extremism emanating from Saudi Arabia; and the continuing bilateral dispute between Iran and the US, dating back to 1979.
Making these points at a meeting of the philosophical society in TCD this week was a former British diplomat and now academic, Michael Axworthy, who pointed out that Saudi-financed extremism in Iraq has been far more damaging to US troops than Iranian Shia influence. In fact Iran has helped stabilise Iraq and Afghanistan, and needs to do so as the major regional beneficiary of the US wars in both countries. We hear too little about such realities through the fog of propaganda generated by the continuing US-Iranian standoff.
An alternative strategy would aim for greater regional integration in which all relevant powers would have a stake in a stable status quo. Such a "grand bargain" has now been taken up even by the neoconservative Robert Kagan, who wants to see it put in place before Bush leaves office.
It assumes Iranian leaders are capable of responding rationally to a plan that could protect them by guaranteeing their regional security, borders, and economic interests in return for undertakings not to develop nuclear weapons and recognise an agreed regional order. It is worth testing their willingness to do such a deal, knowing that a more relaxed security environment would best allow Iranians to choose between war and peace, irrespective of what their leaders do or say. Iran's internal contradictions would thus have more freedom to express themselves, despite repression, as elections are held this year and next.