Rosett: Regime change works

Shoe-flingers may scoff, but the incident in Baghdad underscores Claudia Rosett’s point in her Forbes column today: regime change works.  Rosett looks at the successful transition to democracy in Iraq and its ripple effects and compares them to the diplomatic efforts to end the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea:

Yet, regime change has an advantage over talks that it would be foolish to ignore–namely, it works. History gives us five examples of countries that have given up nuclear weapons: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, South Africa and Libya. Of these, the first three inherited their arsenals from the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and gave them up soon after independence. The core Soviet state of Russia, which kept its arsenal, was at least bumped for a generation from the roster of imminent threats to the U.S.–thanks to the same Soviet collapse, aka regime change.

South Africa gave up its bombs in the early 1990s, as its apartheid regime gave way to a system of majority rule. And in Libya, the most recent case, while there was no change of Gadhafi’s regime, there was a proxy effect. Gadhafi agreed to hand over his well-advanced nuclear kit in late 2003, while the fear was still fresh on him that having imposed regime change on Baghdad, America’s cowboy president might next turn his sights on Tripoli.

In every case, the surrender of nuclear weapons was achieved not by way of drawn-out dickering over inspection regimes, or payments of nuclear blackmail, but by way of willing cooperation by the governments involved. There is a colossal difference between disarming a regime that wants to hand over its nuclear portfolio, and one that is trying to bamboozle inspectors and extort concessions while building bombs.

That difference has been amply showcased for years now in both Iran and North Korea. Diplomatic efforts to talk Iran out of its bomb program have been going on for at least the past five years, courtesy of the European Union, the United Nations and now via an agglomeration known as the 5+1 plus Arab countries (the 5+1 being the U.N. Security Council permanent five, plus Germany). And still, Iran is enriching uranium at speed.

In North Korea, after more than four years of Six-Party Talks, punctuated by declarations of commitment to de-nuclearization, Kim Jong Il’s regime has pulled in vast stores of free food and free fuel. North Korea has gotten itself off the U.S. State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring regimes, is out from under the Trading With the Enemy Act, has (with the help of the U.S. Federal Reserve, no less) retrieved $25 million in allegedly crime-tainted funds frozen in 2005 at Macau’s Banco Delta Asia, and, earlier this year, billed America $2.5 million for the sham of blowing up a cooling tower at its on-again off-again Yongbyon nuclear complex.

I agree with Rosett about the lessons here, but she misses part of the important issue of how to bring about regime change.  In Iraq, Bush took the direct route, ending a dozen-year standoff with Saddam Hussein and acquiring a five-year headache in occupying Iraq.  We finally came out of that with a successful transition to representative democracy and increasing stability, but could we have afforded to do that in Iran and North Korea?  In either case, it would have touched off a much bigger war than what we faced in Iraq and what we have now in Afghanistan, and we barely managed to make our way through those over the past five years.

We could, however, act like we want regime change in the two confrontations.  The US has gone out of its way to deny that as a policy, even though we very clearly wanted regime change in the Soviet Union for 40 years and in South Africa for at least a decade.  Neither Iran nor North Korea amounts to the same kind of Cold War threat we once faced, so why are we so reluctant to encourage regime change for two members of the Axis of Evil?  Why not use our considerable assets in communications and technology to bolster freedom activists and foster the kind of velvet uprisings as we saw in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Georgia, and so on?

Clearly, the problem in Iran and North Korea is less the weapons themselves than the lunatics who would wield them.  We should focus on the real problem as a natural antidote to the symptoms.