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Dealing with Iran
(Wall Street Journal) Douglas J. Feith - At the heart of the Obama-Netanyahu dispute - and of the president's clash with Congress - is not diplomacy versus war. It's the difference between cooperative diplomacy and coercive diplomacy. By taking a cooperative approach, Obama insists, the U.S. and others can persuade Iran's ruling ayatollahs to play by rules that all parties voluntarily accept. In contrast, the coercive option, which Netanyahu favors, assumes that Iran will remain hostile, dishonest and dangerous. When Obama says the Israeli leader has offered "no viable alternative" to the deal being negotiated, he is denying that a coercive option exists. But Netanyahu's point is that we can have one if we try. Iranian leaders have a long record of shameless dishonesty. Their aid to the tyrannical Assad regime has been massive since the Syrian civil war began, but they routinely deny it. And they make a practice of lying to UN weapons inspectors. History teaches that constraining bad actors through arms control and peace accords is a losing bet. The arms-control approach is to invite bad actors to sign legal agreements. This produces signing ceremonies, but the bad actors inevitably violate them. The writer served as U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy (2001-05).