The UN votes to approve economic sanctions on Iran, but the sanctions aren’t especially tough. “We don’t think this resolution is enough in itself,” says Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who’s almost certainly correct. Why didn’t a tougher package get through the Security Council?

The administration had pushed for tougher penalties. But Russia and China, which both have strong commercial ties to Tehran, and Qatar, across the Persian Gulf from Iran, balked. To get their votes, the resolution dropped penalties such as a ban on international travel by Iranian officials involved in nuclear and missile development.

To me, this is where the small matter of diplomacy enters the picture. I really don’t want to see the United States start a war with Iran, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to knock down paranoia about the Iranian nuclear program. Nevertheless, it is true at the end of the day that it would be strongly preferable for Iran to halt its quest for nuclear weapons. Under the circumstances, it would be good to be wielding tougher sanctions as a stick. That means not just throwing up our hands and saying “well, Russia and China have strong commercial ties to Iran” but also saying to ourselves, “there are probably some things that are more important to Russia and China than their commercial ties to Iran.” Find out what those are. Find out of those things are less important to us than is getting tougher sanctions on Iran. Maybe there isn’t a good deal to be cut here, but my guess is that there is. Similarly, sanctions and the threat of sanctions will work much better if the Iranians know that a grand bargain would be on the table were they interested in avoiding confrontation.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I would recommend Barry Posen’s Century Foundation paper as putting the problems posed by Iranian nuclearization in an appropriately non-alarmist perspective.

To the administration’s plan for a SCIRI/Hashemi/Kurd coalition aimed at taking down Muqtada al-Sadr. The grand ayatollah says he supports Shiite unity, and will not endorse any coalition aimed at dividing the Shiites. This seems like a smart move to me. Sistani’s early political interventions were highly effective, but quickly began compromising his position as a religious leader. To choose sides in an intra-communal dispute, especially to choose in a manner that put him on the side of the foreign occupiers, would merely further risk his standing.

Drum and Ackerman have already commented on Matt Continetti’s efforts to divide America into a “peace party” and a “power party” with a focus on the tunnel-vision conception of national power implicit in that dichotomy. I thought, however, that one should stick up on some level for the idea of a peace party and recommend this recent post by John Quiggin.

Wars, as he says, are destructive activities. Something one should seek to avoid: “The starting point the observation that war is a negative-sum game, so the fact that one side loses does not mean that the other wins. If losing a war means coming out of it worse than you went in, then Vietnam is not the first war the US has lost. The War of 1812 ended with the restoration of the status quo ante, but 25 000 Americans were dead, Washington had been burned, and huge economic damage had been done.” An even more telling example, in many ways, comes from one of our classic “good wars” — the Civil War. The Union cause was just and the war was one, but the price was high. The quantity of resources spent on the war would have been sufficient to compensate current slave owners at market prices, give the freed slaves much more substantial aid than what was, in fact, offered them after the war. This, needless to say, would have been expensive, but it would actually have saved Union taxpayers money, to say nothing of avoiding massive loss of life and large-scale devastation of Southern infrastructure.

Given the realities of the situation, it seems unlikely that the Civil War really could have been avoided in that manner. Still, the example merely demonstrates the extent to which war is negative-sum; even when successful it’s an extremely sub-optimal method of achieving policy objectives. As Quiggin elaborates, a strong aversion to war does not imply a policy of blanket pacifism or of massive American retreat from a global role: “The Iraq war showed, yet again, that in conventional military conflicts the US is unbeatable, and, for practical purposes unstoppable . . . the US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity.”