Plan => Iran Emboldenment

Plan => Iran Emboldenment

In Iran, Ahmadinejad clearly perceives that challenging Obama is low-risk and high reward. If he can finally demonstrate that the United States is unwilling to take military action regardless of provocations, his own domestic situation improves dramatically, his relationship with the Russians deepens, and most important, his regional influence — and menace — surges. If Obama accepts Iranian nukes without serious sanctions or military actions, the American position in the Islamic world will decline dramatically. The Arab states in the region rely on the United States to protect them from Iran, so U.S. acquiescence in the face of Iranian nuclear weapons would reshape U.S. relations in the region far more than a hundred Cairo speeches.

There are four permutations Obama might choose in response to the dual crisis. He could attack Iran and increase forces in Afghanistan, but he might well wind up stuck in a long-term war in Afghanistan. He could avoid that long-term war by withdrawing from Afghanistan and also ignore Iran’s program, but that would leave many regimes reliant on the United States for defense against Iran in the lurch.

The risk of Iranian prolif – their statements are unreliable and empirical data suggests the opposite

Carpenter, 6 -- vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, author of "Iran's Nuclear Program: America's Policy Options." (9/20, Ted Galen, “Keep a Cool Hand,” CATO, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6689)

The bulk of the evidence indicates that Iran is years away from being able to build nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence agencies maintain that Iran will not have such a capability for another five to 10 years, and prominent independent experts agree.

A report by the GOP-dominated staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence late last month cast doubt on the conclusions of the intelligence community but offered little more than innuendo and unsubstantiated assertions to make its case. Indeed, even the Israeli government, which has an obvious interest in presenting a worst-case scenario of the Iranian nuclear threat, concedes that Tehran will not be able to build such weapons for at least three years.

Even three years is a significant amount of time to weigh policy options. Only the most eager Iran hawks argue that the danger is imminent. Given their record, they have little credibility. Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, for example, asserted in 1993 that Iran might well have the bomb by 2001.

AT: Iran Cooperation / relations

"If true, this would be yet another serious violation of Iran's clear obligations under multiple UN Security Council resolutions and another example of Iran choosing to isolate itself," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement.

"Time is running out for Iran to address the international community's growing concerns about its nuclear program."
US-Iran relations are impossible – support for terrorism, American hostages, anti-American rhetoric, and flawed policies by Obama all make rapprochement wishful thinking.

Phillips, 10 – (1/20/10, James Phillips, Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation “Obama and Iran: Good Intentions are Not Enough,” The Heritage Foundation, http://blog.heritage.org/?p=24267)
The Obama Administration has failed to budge the Islamist dictatorship in Tehran on a wide variety of issues, after one year in office. Iran has made a mockery of the Obama Administration’s engagement effort. It not only has rejected any compromise on the nuclear issue but it stubbornly resists moderating its hostile foreign policy as well. To its dismay, the Obama administration has discovered that apologies and professions of good intentions are not enough to sway the ruthless regime in Tehran.

Iran remains the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism and continues to provide arms, training, and financial support to a wide variety of terrorist groups, including Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Tehran also supports groups that are killing U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, Tehran continues to hold Americans as hostages, some of whom it threatens to prosecute as spies. The Iranian government announced on December 14 that it will prosecute three American hikers, who inadvertently strayed over its border with Iraq last spring, on espionage charges which could be punished with the death penalty. New charges also were announced in November against Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, who previously had been sentenced to at least 12 years in prison for “espionage.” Tehran also has stonewalled American efforts to locate Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent who disappeared on a 2007 trip to Iran.

In addition to these unfortunate Americans, the increasingly radical regime in Tehran essentially has taken Iranians hostage, by dropping the façade of democratic elections after Iranians rejected the results of sham elections in June, and mounting a brutal campaign of repression to choke off dissent. The regime has beaten and killed protesters, thrown them in jail where many are tortured or raped, and staged show trials to discredit their reform movement. Meanwhile, President Obama was slow to criticize the regime’s crackdown and has only belatedly and hesitantly criticized the regime’s human rights abuses, hoping to reach a nuclear deal with a weakened dictatorship.

But this hope of improved relations with the odious regime has been revealed as wishful thinking. There has been little progress on the administration’s efforts to diplomatically defuse the nuclear standoff. Instead, Iran over the last year has spurned western proposals for resolving the nuclear issue, firmly insisted that it will continue to expand its nuclear program, installed hundreds of more centrifuges to enrich uranium, been caught secretly constructing another uranium enrichment facility, and pledged to build ten more.

On top of all this bad news from the last year, the Washington Times reported yesterday that U.S. intelligence agencies now suspect that Iran never halted work on its nuclear program in 2003, as a controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate had concluded.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration continues to reassure the murderous regime in Tehran that Washington has good intentions regarding future relations. Unfortunately, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.