Foreign Affairs Friday: What to do with Iran

The US and the international community have not had much luck trying to stop Iran's efforts to create nuclear weapons. The major countries can't agree on sanctions, which probably won't lead Iran to give up its uranium, and most don't really like the idea of a military strike, which would be hard-pressed to destroy all components of the program and would have significant after-effects.

I found two articles this week that propose an alternate approach: a concerted attempt to use the issues of human rights and democracy to topple the Iranian regime.

• Anne Applebaum: "...a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic?

• Robert Kagan likes the sanctions idea, but with a different goal: "It would be better if the administration focused on the regime's instability and ignored the nukes.

  This ought to be the goal of the "crippling" sanctions the Obama administration has threatened. Sanctions will not persuade the present Iranian government to give up its nuclear weapons program. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei see the nuclear program and their own survival as intimately linked. But the right kinds of sanctions could help the Iranian opposition topple these still-vulnerable rulers.

While some people thought the US couldn't have done anything this summer to help the protesters after Iran's fraudulent election, Kagan states, "The toppling of dictators -- Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, the Polish Communists -- has frequently been aided, sometimes decisively, by foreign involvement, through support to opposition forces or sanctions against the government. One of the main fears of Chinese leaders in 1989 was that students carrying replicas of the Statue of Liberty might gather support from abroad." I agree. No matter what, Iranian leaders will accuse protesters of being Western puppets, so we might as well help out. The people of Iran realize that the post-election protests were legitimate and indigenous.

Considering the apparent hopelessness of the current approach to Iran, even if Russia comes on board, I think the regime-toppling approach is worth a shot.