By Stephen S. Rosenfeld

Friday, March 28 1997; Page A29
The Washington Post

Think strategically, not emotionally, we are told by foreign-policy realists for whom the current American policy of isolating the Islamic Republic of Iran is a dead end denying us the very access, company and influence we could use to alter the Iranian policies we abhor.

But wait a minute. Thinking strategically means taking into account Iran's weight and sensitive geography, Russia's geopolitical overhang and the great coming prize of Caspian oil. Fine. But it also means in some measure accommodating a regime that is revolutionary in deed as well as word and that after 18 years still actively engages in terrorism, violence and subversion and secretly pursues weapons of mass destruction. Not so fine.

The country that most needs strategic thinking is Iran. The feud with the United States that is for us a pesky regional problem is for them a risky and expensive national distraction. Iran's principal burden is not American hostility but its own contempt for the international rules, which denies it the greater neighborhood acceptance and foreign investment that could ease its way in its scorpion's environment.

Thinking emotionally is a loaded way to describe a concern for human rights and democracy. It suggests they are frills. In the case of Iran, however, the two ways of thinking are not inconsistent. Arguably, the United States has strategic reasons to stand off from Tehran. Without doubt, there are "emotional" reasons, too.

Take the current case of the Iranian writer Faraj Sarkuhi, imprisoned eight years under the shah, arrested for the fourth time in five months by the mullahs' police last Nov. 3. His open letter appears in the New York Review of Books dated April 10. He wrote it on Jan. 3 in a state of extreme agitation expecting that he would soon be arrested again, tortured again and murdered.

His police tormentors apparently were using him as an instrument of their crackdown on writers and intellectuals. They also intended to use his coerced confessions to paint him as a French and German spy in order to deflate the Mykonos affair. In a trial that has sobered much of European opinion, an Iranian and four Lebanese stand accused in Berlin of assassinating an Iranian opposition leader and three companions at the Mykonos restaurant in that city in 1992.

Well, yes, I did feel a bit emotional reading what may well have been Sarkuhi's last public word: "I don't know how long I have. I await imminent arrest or an incident whereby I will be murdered and my death will be presented as a suicide. Torture, prison and death await me." But what is one supposed to do with the emotion generated by the spectacle of a decent man in possibly terminal distress? Be tough and ignore it? Be sentimental and declare war? I'm disposed to look for an Option B: a position that somehow takes into account both the human injustice and the political complexity. Such a position is always unsatisfactory, but better than the alternatives.

The Europeans and Japan have their own, flabby response. They bow to the United States and agree that the Americans are right to view the Iranian regime as an outlaw. But, without asking for moderation in Iranian conduct, they ignore the unilateral American trade boycott and decry the U.S. sanctions penalizing foreign companies that do major energy business with Iran. Better, they say, to work quietly on the inside and conduct a "constructive dialogue" on human rights with Iran.

But the case of the writer Sarkuhi, which is not an isolated case and which has unfolded just in the past few months, seems to me to constitute a telling comment on what can be expected from "constructive dialogue."

There's an antidote in a policy paper of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy: to press our principal allies and trading partners, who now ask nothing from Iran, to join us (1) in setting concrete standards for judging the actual efficacy of "critical dialogue" and (2) in adopting a common policy based on the results.

Both Washington and Tehran pronounce themselves prepared for some kind of dialogue of their own. But the Americans want to discuss first Iran's terrorism, subversion and weapons programs, while the Iranians bring up the political and economic consolidation of their regime. The makings of a common agenda are not yet in sight.

In the interim, someone should figure out how to restore a permanent American diplomatic presence in Iran. Formal relations, broken off in Iran's Carter-era hijacking of the American Embassy, have never been restored. To listen and to follow up what leads develop over time, we should be back in Tehran.