Engagement with Iran? An Additional View of Professor Gary Sick's Analysis

On Tuesday, we published Chris Emery's summary of last week's talk in London by Professor Gary Sick on Iran and the state of US-Iranian relations. A reader who was also at the talk has offered these additional observations:

Chris Emery has written up some excellent notes on Professor Sick's analysis, so I won't re-hash though them all. I think that the one article covering the talk, Bronwen Maddox in The Times of London, missed the point a little bit. She went for the sensational headline grabber, "Why an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not an option", rather than writing about the larger picture which Sick examined. These include the re-definitions of Israeli/Arab/Iranian roles and their positions in the Middle East due to the redistributions of power in the last eight years. I also think it's a bit too early to render a judgement of whether Sick is as off the spectrum with the Obama Administration as Maddox makes out.

Sick seemed to be almost exactly replicating Trita Parsi's power-cycle competition thesis on the threat and rivalry reassessment, developed for 1990-92, to the current era- which in a nerdy way is pretty fascinating. I might be looking into this a bit too much but I have noticed an increase in the material overplaying the threat depiction of Iran to Israel, echoing the very aggressive posture of Israel's Shimon Peres in 1992. - http://jcpa.org/text/ahmadinejad2-words.pdf See, for example, Joshua Teitelbaum in the Hoover Digest on "What Iranian Leaders Really Say About Doing Away with Israel", Jeremy Issacharoff's recent piece in the Washington Times,  anda bunch more.

Sick kept repeating the need to reassure the Arab states (particularly Saudi Arabia/Egypt) and Israel that if there was a rapprochement towards Iran, they would not be left with a role deficit and/or isolated in the region. And I liked the point about U.S.-Iranian relations not being a foreign policy problem but a domestic problem.

Sick urged the US to hold back the full negotiation efforts with Iran until after the election, and let the "engagement" debate develop organically in Iran throughout the election campaign. I think the last thing [former President Mohammad] Khatami needs is to be considered America's candidate in the race. Although Sick didn't go into details about the Iranian election, it will be interesting if it ends up being a two-way race between Khatami and Ahmadinejad. The Iranian electorate will be faced with a choice based on two very divergent policy differences and governing styles, and it will then be the first really contested election in Iran's post-revolutionary period in which people will be choosing between two candidates with not only divergent ideas but also divergent records.

Sick urged the Obama Admininstration not to repeat the mistakes of Bush in having an incoherent policy towards Iran; however, I think "mixed signals" has been a perpetual theme of America's Iranian policy for the last thirty years. I would have liked to hear more about what should be on the agenda for U.S.-Iran talks.