Karim Sadjadpour, Elliott Abrams and Joshua Muravchi debate: America cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran and must go to any lengths to prevent it.
Bio
Elliott Abrams
Elliott Abrams is the Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations. Abrams is also the Former Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy (2005–09.
Amb. Martin S. Indyk
Ambassador Indyk is the Middle East expert and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin S. Indyk joined the Brookings Institution on September 1, 2001 as a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program.
Ambassador Indyk served two tours in Israel, the first during the Rabin years (1995-97), and the second (2000-June 2001) during efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace and stem the violence of the intifadah. During these periods, he helped to strengthen U.S-Israeli relations, reinforce the U.S. commitment to advance the peace process, and substantially increase the level of mutually beneficial trade and investment.
Prior to his assignment to Israel, Dr. Indyk served as special assistant to President Clinton and as senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council (NSC).
While at the NSC, he served as principal adviser to the president and the National Security Adviser on Arab-Israeli issues, Iraq, Iran, and South Asia. He was a senior member of Secretary Christopher's Middle East peace team and served as the White House representative on the U.S.-Israel Science and Technology Commission.
Joshua Muravchik
Joshua Muravchik is a visiting scholar at the John Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Karim Sadjadpour
Karim Sadjadpour is the International Crisis Group's Iran analyst, based in Tehran and Washington DC. Over the past three years he has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian, American, and European officials, as well as hundreds of interviews with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others.
He is a regular contributor to BBC World, CNN, National Public Radio, and PBS NewsHour, and has also written in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic. Sadjadpour has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, and spoken before the Council on Foreign Relations and Asia Society in New York.
He has degrees from the University of Michigan and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was a visiting fellow at the American University of Beirut, and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Fulbright scholarship. He has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East and speaks Persian, Spanish, Italian, and conversant Arabic.
I have very mixed feelings about the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons. I agree with Sadjadpour about Iran being insecure and in a perfect world I think making efforts to lessen that insecurity would work to prevent nuclear warfare. However, it is not a perfect world and I think that the other two men made some good points about how we have held back with Iran and nothing has changed. I think they did generalize the Iranian people a little bit but I think it is a tough issue and hopefully they will come up with a safe way to handle the situation because that is what really matters. I found an interesting article on this issue recently: http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/...FQ9ZbQodXBwyDQ
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