Hillary Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination have worked themselves into a lather over her recent vote for a non-binding Senate resolution critical of Iran. Not only are they wrong on the merits, they also risk rekindling ancient public doubts about their party’s willingness to confront tough national security challenges.

Iran plainly falls into that category. After years of fruitless multilateral negotiations, Tehran continues to defy the United Nation’s demands that it stop making nuclear fissile material. It supplies weapons and training to groups that have killed U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it bankrolls terrorist groups that share Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s professed goal of wiping Israel off the map.

Rather than defuse these threats, President Bush’s policies have aggravated them. Coming up with a smarter plan for coping with Iran, therefore, is a key test for presidential aspirants in both parties.

Which brings us to votes Clinton, Durbin and a host of other Democratic senators - many of whom voted against the 2002 resolution to authorize the use of force against Iraq - cast last month. The resolution in question asserted a national interest in preventing Iran from creating Hezbollah-like forces in Iraq. It also urged the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a “global terrorist” organization, which it subsequently did.

Some claim the resolution provided President Bush with a pretext for a U.S. attack on Iran. They’ve drawn not-very-subtle parallels between the resolution and her 2002 Iraq vote.

It’s a canard. In the first place, the non-binding resolution didn’t authorize anything, much less a military strike on Iran. On the contrary, it reinforced the alternative to war - a campaign of escalating economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran. And in targeting the Revolutionary Guard, it put the spotlight on the nexus of Iranian aggression.

The IRGC isn’t just a military force, it’s a conglomerate that controls a huge chunk of Iran’s economy. Its companies sell oil, and then solicit foreign investment in both developing the country’s vast oil and gas resources and building pipelines to transport them. The Corps is in charge of Iran’s nuclear fuel program. Through its Quds branch, the Revolutionary Guard also funnels lethal “shape charges” and other weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq as well as the Taliban in Afghanistan. It keeps Lebanon’s Hezbollah supplied with long-range rockets that can strike Israeli cities. And its political and material backing for rejectionist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad is a major impediment to international efforts to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

The Quds force is irrefutably engaged in sponsoring regional terrorism. The point of labeling it a terrorist organization is not to invoke the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war and pave the way to a third Middle East war. It is to discourage European and other companies from doing business with the IRGC, since that would bar them from American markets. This approach builds on U.N. sanctions on IRGC leaders who run Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran’s growing militancy is the bitter harvest we’ve reaped from President Bush’s rash “Axis of Evil” rhetoric, and his bungled occupation of Iraq. Now, many progressives suspect, the White House is whipping up war fever against Tehran to distract attention from its failures in Iraq.

That is all the more reason for Democrats to back tougher economic and diplomatic sanctions against Iran. The point, however, isn’t simply to punish Tehran, it’s to create incentives for Iran to move from confrontation to cooperation.

What’s really missing - and here all Democrats agree - is a serious negotiating strategy that puts bigger carrots on the table even as it raises the costs of Iranian intransigence. This doesn’t mean the next President should rush off to Tehran to engage Ahmadinejad in unconditional talks. In fact, the Iranian president’s economic mismanagement, crackdown on internal dissent and clownish belligerence abroad seem to be wearing thin at home. Instead of boosting his sagging political stock, the U.S. needs to engage in back-channel talks with his critics to lay the groundwork for productive negotiations aimed at normalizing relations between Iran and the United States. This means repudiating the Bush administration’s past calls for regime change in Iran and being prepared to extend diplomatic recognition to Tehran, and lift U.S. economic sanctions.

Critics of sanctions on the IRGC say they could torpedo prospects of high-level talks, since Iran’s ruling mullahs depend on the Revolutionary Guards to keep them in power. Even so, it is in America’s long-term strategic interest to strengthen global norms against terrorism and raise the costs of state-sponsorship, even as we offer Tehran positive inducements to forsake it as a policy tool. After all, the United States did not stand mute in the face of Soviet human rights violations for fear of scuttling arms reduction talks. America needs to talk to Iran, but that doesn’t mean clamming up about its egregious conduct. Senator Clinton and many of her clear-headed colleagues in the Senate seem to grasp this basic principle of democratic statecraft better than her rivals.

This entry was posted on 11.02.2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under National Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.