There is a common perception that by moving to put in place sanctions against Iran, the Obama administration is, as a result, ending its policy of engagement. In other words, we tried diplomacy now we are ready to “move on” to sanctions. This is a misperception and assumes that sanctions and engagement are contradictory. They are not. Any sanctions that are put in place must go hand in hand with a continuous effort to engage Iran.

Those who view sanctions as a substitute for diplomacy insist that for sanctions to be successful they must be so devastating to the country that they force the Iranian regime to simply capitulate. This approach is particularly prevalent on the Hill with the IRPSA sanctions bills and was articulated by Congressman Mark Kirk (R-IL) who asserted that the nuclear standoff could end “without a shot being fired.” In this approach, the US should put sanctions in place and simply wait for the capitulation to come – a sort of Ron Popeil vision for sanctions: “set it and forget it” and in 45 minutes it’s all done.

However, the idea that Iran will just capitulate because of sanctions is fanciful. Authoritarian regimes have shown again and again (see Iraq and Cuba) tremendous staying power in the face of comprehensive sanctions, as they are able to simply transfer the costs of these sanctions to the people and use the sanctions as a scapegoat for the regime’s failings. As Matt Duss has pointed out, the IRPSA sanctions will backfire precisely for these reasons.

Therefore, for sanctions to have any chance of success they must not only be highly targeted to prevent the regime from using them as a nationalist rallying cry, but they must go hand in hand with continued diplomatic engagement. The logic behind targeted international sanctions is that they should focus like a laser on applying costs to the regime itself, thereby preventing them from being used as a nationalist rallying cry. Once in place, the removal of these sanctions becomes a major carrot that the international community can use to lure the Iranians to make concessions. In this view, sanctions are in themselves a tool for negotiations, not a replacement for them.

This has been the approach the Administration has applied to sanctions on North Korea and it appears to be working. Effective international sanctions combined with a willingness on the part of the Obama administration to engage the North Koreans, as seen by Obama’s letter and his Special Envoy’s visit, has pushed Pyongyang to climb down and consent to restart the six-party talks. It is in this vein that Senator Kerry’s offer to visit Tehran, as reported by the Cable on Friday, should be seriously considered by the White House. Kerry apparently pitched this idea to the White House, which it is thinking it over. The Administration has also signaled that is open to further talks, in today’s briefing State Department spokesman PJ Crowley confirmed that “the offer for engagement is still there.”

There shouldn’t be any expectation that sanctions are a silver bullet for the situation in Iran and North Korea and in fact even targeted sanctions may backfire. But if sanctions are to be honestly pursued as a means to stop Iran from getting the bomb, then continuous engagement much continue. Diplomacy does not, and should not, end with sanctions.

In his West Point speech announcing his 30,000 troop escalation in Afghanistan, President Obama declared that he was committed to addressing the ongoing costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “openly and honestly.” Though he did not get into specifics, Obama said he would “work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.”

Some Democrats, such as Rep. David Obey (D-WI), have suggested a war surtax to pay for the estimated $30 billion it will cost to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have rejected a tax. In a new report from the Center for American Progress, Lawrence Korb, Sean Duggan, Laura Conley, and Jacob Stokes recommend that the administration “look to the base defense budget” to pay for the escalation:

Rather than allow the supplemental and additional costs of the escalation for FY2011 to add to the large and growing national deficit, the Obama administration should look to the base defense budget for programs and weapons platforms that can be eliminated or scaled back without jeopardizing our national defense strategy or capabilities. Our allies in Great Britain have adopted such a policy. In order to pay for the cost of sending an additional 500 troops and supporting equipment to the front lines in Afghanistan, the British government is currently “reprioritizing” existing Ministry of Defense spending, including domestic cuts in civilian staff, and a commitment to improve procurement.

Noting that defense investment funds have “grown by approximately 75 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past decade,” they recommend adjustments to “nine costly and outmoded weapons platforms and programs and an across-the-board reduction in research, development, test and evaluation funding” that could save some $40 billion in the next fiscal year:

On Washington Journal this morning, Korb explained how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “are the first wars in our history” where Americans fiscally “haven’t been asked to make any sacrifices.” “Not only did we not raise taxes, we actually cut them and because of that we have this tremendous budget deficit,” said Korb. Watch it:

The large demonstrations that occurred at the funeral of dissident Iranian cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Montazeri indicate that the Green movement, for whom Montazeri was the most prominent source of religious support and legitimacy, remains a potent force in Iran six months after the post-election demonstrations were violently suppressed by the regime, and as thousands of Iranian demonstrators and dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured in the subsequent months.

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman reports that, as U.S.-Iran talks have not resulted in any significant progress on Iran’s nuclear program, “Obama administration officials and their international partners are preparing a package of economic sanctions against Iran for 2010.”

They prefer to work through the United Nations Security Council, but are prepared to work around it if necessary. Absent a major diplomatic breakthrough in the next few days,new sanctions are considered a near inevitability.

Two senior administration officials, Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey and Undersecretary of State William Burns, have for months quietly assembled working groups across the government to determine what a sanctions package might contain. The groups examine Iranian vulnerabilities across a variety of economic sectors, “everything from energy to IRGC [the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an influential and ideological branch of the Iranian military] to financial sector” activity, said a knowledgeable U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss the unsettled contours of administration policy. The House of Representatives last week approved a bill giving Obama new authority to enact additional unilateral sanctions on Iran’s energy imports.

Finding creative ways to frustrate and slow Iran’s nuclear progress, while at the same working to create space for, or at the very least not injure or impair, Iran’s democratic opposition is a key challenge for the U.S. right now. As I wrote last week, Undersecretary Stuart Levey’s package of sanctions measures, which are aimed at garnering necessary international support and focus primarily on regime actors and various front companies used to skirt existing sanctions, not the Iranian people as a whole, probably have the best chance of working, if anything will. On the other hand, the blunt measures (IRPSA) passed by the House last week undermine both of those goals. The theory is that having ready a package of difficult-to-enforce unilateral sanctions that target Iran’s energy sector (and thus the Iranian people themselves, who will bear the brunt of these sanctions’ effects) will encourage more countries to get on board with multilateral sanctions. I’m skeptical of this theory.

Last week, Patrick Disney of the National Iranian American Council wrote of two other important bills that haven’t gotten a lot of attention. According to Disney, these bills — the Stand with the Iranian People Act (SWIPA), led by Rep. Keith Ellison, and the Iranian Digital Empowerment Act (IDEA), led by Rep. Jim Moran — “seek to redefine how Congress approaches the Iran issue“:

SWIPA removes damaging barriers in existing US law that block Americans and Iranians from working together on projects like building hospitals and schools in Iran or promoting human rights. It also places tough, targeted sanctions on human rights abusers within the Iranian government as well as on companies that provide the government with tools of repression.

Similarly, IDEA will enable Iranians to access instant messaging programs like Google Chat and Microsoft Messenger that the companies themselves have shut down in Iran due to US sanctions. It also clarifies that sanctions do not prohibit anti-censorship and anti-spying software to be sent out of the US to Iranians.

As it was during the Cold War, facilitating greater engagement at the NGO level is an important part of creating networks and cultivating solidarity between Iranian human rights activists and their supporters outside the country. And IDEA can be seen as the further implementation of Obama’s “Twitter intervention” during the post-election Iran protests, in which the Obama administration asked Twitter to delay a scheduled maintenance in order to give demonstrators uninterrupted access to the technology, which had proved a hugely important way both for demonstrators to communicate, and for getting information out of Iran: It provides people with access to tools of democracy-building, rather than attempting to directly coerce the government to behave more democratically.

And as all this is going on, the usual suspects are laying the groundwork for the next war. A new poll from the right-wing Israel Project — who were recently caught peddling a truckload of fake signatures in favor of unilateral U.S. sanctions against Iran — suggests that a slight majority of Americans are in favor of bombing Iran in the event that Iran’s nuclear program is not brought to heel. This is unfortunate, as a strike on Iran, either by the U.S. or Israel, would be disastrous in a number of ways. In my view, the success of the Green movement is currently the best option for enhancing U.S., Israeli, and regional security — a recent poll showed that “two-thirds of Iranians would favor their government precluding the development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.” An Iranian system in which those voices are heard, then, is highly favorable. It could take a long time for the Green movement to succeed, and we shouldn’t have any illusions about the ability of outsiders to achieve that success for them, but bombing Iran, and ceaselessly talking about bombing Iran, is probably the best way to kill it.