This Washington Post story about the Washington debate over Iran is revealing for two reasons. First, the administration doesn’t seem to be phased by Manichean, inwardly focused arguments through analogy about why President Obama needs to intercede, rhetorically, into the Iranian opposition’s uprising. “We’re trying to promote a foreign policy that advances our interests, not that makes us feel good about ourselves,” a senior administration official told the paper’s Scott Wilson. Second, a different quote in the piece indicates the administration doesn’t want to step in the way of a phenomenon that might mean a whole lot of good things for those interests: “There is something particularly authentic about those who are carrying out these demonstrations … The more you keep this in Iranian terms, the better the chances of change.”

That matches background conversations I’ve had with administration people as well, and they typically cash this issue out in terms of the nuclear question. Just check out State Department spokesman Ian Kelly’s minuet with the press yesterday. As with all administration statements on Iran since June 12, Kelly preserves administration options on future-scope negotiations with the Iranians on their nuclear program. Even if the opposition triumphs — and I don’t think we even know what that means — it’s still unclear what that will mean for the nuclear question. Mir Hussein Moussavi’s public statemens indicate a willingness to pursue nuclear energy without weaponization,  but who knows what domestic constraints he would be under even if he miraculously becomes president under a system giving the presidency greater foreign policy authority. Still, the nuclear question is the one that really does concern the administration. I think it’s fair to say that administration officials consider a nuclear-armed Iran to be high on its list of foreign-policy disasters.

But what about Iran’s other effects? On the entire Middle East?

And here comes the irresponsible speculation. In 2004, Jordanian King Abdullah came to Washington and warned about a Shiite “Crescent” of Iranian influence spreading across the Middle East. As he saw it, Iran’s inroads into war-torn Iraq had helped ignite a spark of sectarian conflict that benefited Iranian interests and facilitated the expansion of Iranian power in the region. Hezbollah received increased weaponry and funding that aided it in provoking and then battling Israel in the 2006 war. Hamas received weaponry and funding that aided it in taking over Gaza in 2007 and then provoking and battling Israel, much less well, in this past winter’s war. Shiite political parties all types of in Iraq received funding and in some cases weaponry, as Iran opted for a bet-on-all-horses approach to the country’s politics. Syria expanded its bandwagoning relationship with Iran. The rhetoric from Iran  grew increasingly bellicose — a contributing factor was being surrounded by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — and in 2007 Iran briefly took British sailors captive.

There’s so much we don’t know about the Iranian opposition. We don’t know what it would mean for it to take power. We don’t know what constraints on its ability to influence foreign policy would be. We don’t know what its desires for regional and global foreign policy are. We don’t know how its various factions define Iranian interests, or how those definitions conflict with each other. We don’t know what its relationships with the security apparatus would be. We don’t know what its relationship with the millions of Ahmadinejad supporters would be.

But it’s crazy to think that the rise to power of the opposition, as miraculous as that looks on June 23, wouldn’t have some effect on Iranian power in the Middle East. Various Iranian clients would have to reassess their considerations of the strengths of their ties to the regime. Some would have to ask if they’d have the same sort of client-proxy relationship they currently enjoy. Others — Hamas, probably — would wonder whether they’d have a continued relationship with a vastly changed Iran. U.S. partner regimes in the region, consequently, would ask whether Iran remains the threatening, hegemony-seeking entity that they’ve perceived for years.

Again, it’s way, way, way too early to really have an evidentiary basis for any of this. The opposition, of course, still hasn’t won yet, and things are looking bleak and tense. Hussein Ibish may be right that this is “a revolutionary situation,” and so much can happen in revolutions, as deposed revolutionary Iranian President Abolhassan Bani Sadr can attest. And the Obama administration does not see the Middle East as a canvas in the way that some Bush administration officials did. But the understandable calculus of keeping its focus on what posture is best for addressing the nuclear question shouldn’t obscure the likelihood that if the opposition wins, a significant amount of Middle Eastern politics and diplomacy will change. The direction of that change is unpredictable, but the prospect of its occurrance is fairly strong.

As we recited this on Saturday, I couldn’t help but reflect that a distressingly small number of my fellow Jews seem to have given much thought at all to the fact that President Bush is one of the greatest friends the state of Israel — and, yes, the Jewish people — have had in quite a while.

I truly hope no one in the Kristol family suffers from an addiction, because Bill Kristol does not know the difference between being a friend and being an enabler.

A friend tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. An enabler goes along with what you want to do at any given time and reinforces your more self-destructive or shortsighted impulses. “For too long our culture has said, ‘If it feels good, do it,’” George W. Bush frequently hectored the American people, imploring them to turn away from that easy and emotive answer. Certainly, when it came to Israel/Palestine, he never followed his own advice.

Eight years ago, the outlines of a sustainable Israeli-Palestinian peace — two states, an end to occupation, compromises on refugees and Jerusalem and borders — came into undeniable relief under a problematic but secular Palestinian leadership. Today, as every diplomat in the region and beyond acknowledges, those outlines provide the only hopeful path to peace. Only now we’re two Israeli-Palestinian wars later; one Israeli-Hezbollah-Lebanon war later; an increased amount of Iranian regional influence later; a new era of Hamas control over half of Palestine later; and a diminished amount of American regional influence later. It’s not the case that every malady suffered in the region is the fault of the United States, or of George W. Bush. But no one can honestly say, without retreating into some fallacious and meaningless counterfactual conditional, that the Bush administration has been a net benefit to either Israelis or Palestinians. We can’t know what the alternatives would have yielded, but we know that there’s no future along this path but endless catastrophe, and so it’s time to explore the road not taken.

“There is no room for a cease-fire.”

“The government is determined to remove the threat of fire on the south,” he said, referring to rocket attacks on southern Israel by Hamas forces. “Therefore the Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel.”

What’s fueling Sheetrit’s rhetoric isn’t just the Qassam missile threat to Sderot and neighboring areas of southern Israel, which despite its relentlessness has killed fewer than 20 people since 2001. It’s the prospect of exorcising the ghosts of the 2006 Lebanon invasion that failed to destroy Hezbollah. Hence the rhetoric of not stopping until… well, until some absurd metaphysical condition called “broken will” is achieved. This is not a clear mission. What happens after the bombardment stops and Hamas lobs another Qassam — or, worse, infiltrates a suicide bomber to Sderot or elsewhere? Forty years of occupation couldn’t “break” Palestinian “will.” How much bombardment can do the trick?

Defense Minister Ehud Barak distinguishes himself, though, talking about an “all-out war” to the “bitter end” in advance of his campaign for prime minister. It’s too pat to say that because Barak offered Yasir Arafat a far-reaching peace deal in 2000 that he’s inconsistent for supporting the pummelling of Gaza. Sometimes it’s right to make peace and other times it’s necessary to defend yourself. An “all-out war” that will do neither in the long run, however, is a catastrophe and should bar someone from qualifying for high office.

The United Nations wants a ceasefire. Even the Bush administration wants a ceasefire, though the way it expresses that — “In order for violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable cease-fire,” in spokesman Gordon Johndroe’s words — will sound like capitulation to the Palestinians. The smartest thing Israel can do is arbitrarily declare that Hamas’ will has been broken and stop the bombing.

My worry is that the greatest danger in creating a society of resistance is that you might actually succeed. [Boston University professor Andrew] Bacevich may talk about American militarism, but I worry more about these non-state actors who build up armed conflict as their raison d’être. If peace in suddenly in your best interest a year or so down the road, for example, how are you going to tell these kids to stand down? Are they going to be happy working in a cell phone kiosk in Tyre?

That’s exactly right. The cynic will want to say that organizations like Hezbollah have no intention of standing down, and the society-of-resistance crap represents a fairly thorough strategy.

My guess is kind of a modified view of that: they’re building the equivalent of an ideological perpetual-motion-machine, where their raison d’etre might be the realization of specific, not metaphysical, goals — like gaining control of Lebanon or the reconquest of Israel or what-have-you — but their ethic or espirit d’corps is based around being implacable.

Call it a condition of permanent hysteria. Maybe it’s the case that in Year X, their best interests are to make peace. But they’re creating a mindset where they’ll never perceive peace as being in their interests in any long-term sense.

To paraphrase Chris Hedges, a culture of resistance is a force that gives us meaning. To return to a bourgeoise life, or to choose one — selling cellphones in Tyre, for example — is meant, I’d submit, to be a foreclosed option. The building of the society of resistance, says the recruiter to the youth-scout-in-training — now that is the honorable profession. There’s time enough to sell cell phones in paradise.

It’s almost as if these guys are bad people or something.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Wikimedia)

Just in time for a presidential election in which the economy has overshadowed foreign policy, two former Bush administration aides are calling for a “grand bargain” with Iran.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, a married couple who served as Iran experts at the National Security Council during George W. Bush’s first term, have issued a call for “thorough-going strategic rapprochement” with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is still on the State Dept.’s list of sponsors of terrorism.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Under the auspices of the New America Foundation, a Washington policy organization where Flynt Leverett is now a scholar in residence, the two former NSC staff members contend that only by “clarifying America’s willingness to have normal relations with the Islamic Republic and recognizing a legitimate regional and international role for Iran” can Washington resolve its concerns about Iran’s terrorism connections and nuclear-energy production.

The Leveretts’ proposal comes as Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain are continuing their arguments about the proper place for negotiations with Tehran. Last year, Obama offered to negotiate with the Iranians “without preconditions.” In an interview with the New York Times, he clarified his position, saying that he would use “aggressive personal diplomacy,” combined with economic inducements, to address the sources of U.S.-Iranian antagonism.

McCain has regularly portrayed Obama’s approach as naive. Negotiating with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, McCain said in the Sept. 26 presidential debate, would “give a propaganda platform to a person that is espousing the extermination of the state of Israel, and therefore then giving them more credence in the world arena.”

Ahmadinejad, by any measure an anti-Semite, has been repeatedly misquoted by conservatives and never called for the extermination of Israel. McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has claimed, without evidence, that Iran seeks a “second Holocaust” for the Jews.

In any case, McCain added that he would “sit down with anybody, but there’s got to be pre-conditions,” suggesting that his approach to the Islamic Republic might go beyond his infamous “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” joke.

The Leveretts pitch their proposal as transcending liberal or conservative perspectives. Their key point is that the approach adopted by Democratic and Republican administrations for 30 years — “isolation and economic pressure” matched with “thinly veiled threats of regime change,” to use Flynt Leverett’s phrase — “is not working by any definition of ‘working’ you could care to employ,” he said.

Other experts seem to agree.

The Khomeini Mausoleum in Tehran (Wikimedia)

“The only real posture we can have that will, in any way, be more likely to be effective is to do two things,” said Hooman Majd, author of “The Ayatollah Begs To Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran”: “one, eliminate military threats and the regime-change policy, and two, to indicate that we are perfectly willing to sit down and discuss our problems and our areas of mutual interest.”

Last year, an influential Iran scholar, Ray Takeyh, published a call for “detente” with Iran in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. He called for a similar but less far-reaching strategic shift.

“Washington must eschew superficially appealing military options, the prospect of conditional talks and its policy of containing Iran in favor of a new policy of détente,” Takeyh wrote. “In particular, it should offer pragmatists in Tehran a chance to resume diplomatic and economic relations.”

Alex Rossmiller, a former intelligence analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency, also supports this approach. “It’s hard to overstate the importance of engaging in comprehensive dialogue with Iran,” Rossmiller said.

In essence, the Leveretts’ proposal is an attempt to settle all areas of U.S.-Iranian conflict — from Iranian rejection of Arab-Israeli peace, for example, to periodic U.S. threats against the Iranian government.

The couple rejects an incremental approach in favor of putting “all [issues] on the table at the same time,” Flynt Leverett said in an address at the New America Foundation last Tuesday. “That’s the only way relations will improve.”

The result sought by the Leveretts is “a normal relationship” between Washington and Tehran, according to Flynt Leverett, with the U.S. accepting “a legitimate role” for Iran in the Middle East.

Yet when asked by The Washington Independent what sort of role they envisioned, neither author entirely answered the question.

For example, Iran offers financial and military support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two leading extremist organizations that reject normalized relations with Israel. Flynt Leverett said that demanding “no contact” with Hamas and Hezbollah would be unrealistic. Instead, he said that Washington could successfully negotiate “what kind of relationship” would be acceptable to the U.S. and Israel for Iran to maintain with both radical entities.

He did not offer his own definition of what kind of relationship would satisfy Iranian, U.S. and Israeli interests.

Hillary Mann Leverett, now affiliated with the Stratega consulting firm, argued at the New America address last week that the Iranians, at high levels, strongly desire the end to U.S.-Iranian animosity. She said she “participated for two years in almost monthly meetings with Amb. Ryan Crocker to coordinate” U.S.-Iranian counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan after 9/11, before hard-line Bush administration officials canceled them in favor of a more aggressive approach.

During those talks, she said, “Rafsanjani, Khatami and Ahmadinejad officials told us that they hoped [the talks] would lead to a broader strategic opening” — referring to previous and current Iranian governments.

“It may be frustrating to contemplate offering carrots to Iran,” noted Rossmiller, “but as we’ve seen in countries such as North Korea and Libya, comprehensive negotiation is vital for our security goals — goals that will not be achieved by further belligerence and refusal to engage.”

For the Iranians, the Leveretts contend, the overriding strategic concern is to keep the Islamic Republic alive against outside threats. Currently, U.S. forces are in adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq, and U.S. warships patrol the Persian Gulf to its south.

Other experts agree. “Ayatollah Khamenei’s No. 1 priority is the preservation of the fruit of the Iranian revolution — he views the continued existence of the Islamic Republic as an Islamic Republic as a first-order goal — to which all other goals can be subordinated,” said Matt Duss, a fellow at the Center for American Progress.

In addition, Hillary Mann Leverett said, Iranian diplomats and military officers told her that they fear hostile relations from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two key U.S. allies, as well as the weight of the Sunni Arab states to its west. Its neighbors “are all strategic adversaries,” she said, leaving the Iranians with “nowhere to go.”

The Iranians view better relations with Washington as key to achieving a lasting reduction of tensions with its neighbors. Tehran was reportedly shocked when Washington rejected its post-9/11 overtures for peace, leading to the increased Iranian hostility of the past five years.

It is unclear, of course, whether U.S.-Iranian talks could result in the grand bargain that the Leveretts propose. The history between the two nations creates fertile ground for skepticism. In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency assisted the British in overthrowing an Iranian government that opposed British oil interests, a coup that many Iranians still consider an affront to their national pride.

Washington, meanwhile, vividly recalls the 1979 occupation of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, in which Iranian revolutionaries held 52 U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days.

“It doesn’t mean that we can reach a ‘grand bargain’ very soon,” Majd said.

“The critical point is to recognize that Iran has a set of legitimate interests, and that any bargain has to take those interests into account,” said Robert Farley, a national security professor at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, in an email.  “In some cases those interests run counter to ours, but a grand bargain isn’t about giving the Iranians everything they want. Rather, it’s about figuring out where and how the United States and Iran can compromise, such that they can enjoy the benefits of a cordial (if not friendly) relationship.  Those benefits are immense on both the security and the economic sides.”

Majd added that there was a path forward for fruitful negotiation. “The Iranians have made it crystal clear that they are willing to meet with the U.S. and negotiate — as long as pre-conditions are not attached,” Majd said.

“Pre-conditions, to the Iranians, are insulting, plain and simple.” Majd continued. “It’s as if they are being treated as second-rate. And their overriding concerns are to be treated with respect as a sovereign nation, and to maintain the stability of the regime. They fully understand that the second part, maintaining the stability, requires full engagement with the West. And that includes the U.S.”