Transcript
MARTIN INDYK: Welcome to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and to the symposium that we are hosting today entitled "Towards a New Iran Policy."
We've gathered a group of experts on Iran and on U.S. policy to grapple today with the thorny problem of what to do about Iran. For much of the last four years, that question was put in what I call the too hard basket by the first Bush Administration, and there was a good reason for that. It was too hard. Short of invading a country of 69 million people, we didn't have a good way of changing some very troubling aspects of the regime's policy: its aggressive sponsorship of terrorism, particularly in the Arab-Israeli arena, its determined pursuit of nuclear weapons, its meddling in Iraq, and its systematic abuse of the human rights of its citizens.
To be fair to the Bush Administration, it's not as if anybody else had a workable idea.
I personally had some experience with Iran in the eight years of the Clinton Administration. We contained it successfully for a while, but ultimately that failed. Then, when Mohammed Khatami was elected in a landslide, we tried to engage him for a while, but ultimately that failed, too.
On the other hand, ignoring the problem posed by Iran obviously didn't work either. Today, the country is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, with all the dangerous implications that could have for regional stability and a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Today, Iran is in a position to influence the future of neighboring Iraq in a way it had never been able to do before. Today, Iran, through its Hizballah proxy, could launch Palestinian terror attacks against Israel that would put paid to all the hope of a new day in the Middle East peace process, just as its sponsorship of Palestinian terror back in 1995 and 1996 helped to destroy the peace making hopes during the Rabin-Peres era.
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