Speaking of Ahmadinejad, one of the most bizarre aspects of the debate about what to do about Iran is the use being made by the appeasement camp of his recent letter to President Bush. It has been widely portrayed in the press as a diplomatic “breakthrough,” an opening for direct contacts that must not be allowed to slip away. In fact, a close reading of the document makes clear that what the Iranian regime has in mind for the United States is war, not diplomacy. Notably, the closing passage is a direct quote from a message sent by the Prophet Mohammed as he prepared to launch a devastating attack on its recipient.
The alternative to appeasement of Iran should utilize the sorts of techniques Ronald Reagan employed to counter the last horrific totalitarian ideology that threatened our destruction, the Soviet Union. These include using every available means to de-legitimate the regime. It also means helping those oppressed by our enemies, in order to assist them in undermining and, if possible, in bringing down their government – a popular aspiration lately confirmed anew by a spate of tumultuous demonstrations across Iran.
President Reagan placed special emphasis on one other initiative: drying up the funding streams that enabled the USSR to build up its military threat and to pay for anti-Western revolutions all over the globe. The same must be done to Iran.
The most obvious means of doing so – economic sanctions – are not supported by Iran’s strategic allies, Russia and China, and its business partners in many energy-hungry European nations and Japan. As a result, there seems little hope of imposing on a multilateral basis sanctions comparable to the long-standing American ones on oil purchases and other trade with Iran.
According to a front-page article in the Washington Post on Monday, a Treasury Department-led task force is trying a variation on the theme: It is seeking the cooperation of allies in eschewing business with “every Iranian official, individual and entity the Bush Administration considers connected not only to nuclear enrichment efforts but to terrorism, government corruption, suppression of religious or democratic freedom and violence” in neighboring states. Not surprisingly, the response has been underwhelming to date. The Post reports that, “So far, four financial institutions have signed on to the U.S. effort.”
Fortunately, America has an opportunity to bring more than moral suasion to bear on those who partner with our enemies and, thereby, help underwrite their threatening behavior: Make them choose whether they wish to do business with us, or with the Iranians.
Last month, the Louisiana Sheriffs public pension fund became the first in the nation to adopt such an approach in the form of a terror-free investment policy. Its portfolio managers, including T. Roe Price, have agreed that the sheriffs’ retirement money will not be invested in foreign energy, telecommunications, banks and other companies that engage in commercial activities and investment in state-sponsors of terror like Iran.
The U.S. government should encourage this model – call it Divest Iran – to be adopted by the scores of millions of other American investors whose decisions to hold or dispose of stocks will probably have a lot more influence with Iranian-connected enterprises than will pleas from our “engagement”-minded officials. Such a privatization of the effort to end the danger posed by the Iranian mullahs may not only make for a more coherent U.S. policy. It may even make it possible to avoid the use of force against Iran that could otherwise become unavoidable.