How Bush Blundered on Iran
Barbara Slavin’s article in Foreign Policy Magazine describes some of the Bush administrations failed Mid-East policies focusing on how Iran’s ultra-conservatives were strengthened as a result of myopia and miscalculations from the Bush White House.
Slavin puts today’s increasing hostilities into context by pointing to several opportunities where progress toward a constructive relationship could have been established.
The recent resignation of Ali Larijani, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, is a case in point. Caught between American neocons and Iranian hardliners, Larijani stepped down last month and was replaced by Saeed Jalili, an obscure foreign ministry official and crony of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.Larijani could have achieved more with timely U.S. backing. In the winter of 2005-2006, he began making overtures to the Bush administration, going so far as to praise U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as a “logical thinker” in an interview with me in Tehran. Larijani also authorized a deputy, Mohammad Javad Jaffari, to set up back-channel talks with Hadley or a designated emissary. The White House never replied.
n March 2006, Larijani went further and publicly accepted a prior U.S. offer for talks on Iraq. A week later, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed Larijani’s acceptance, the first time Khamenei had publicly approved direct talks with the United States. Again, the Bush administration demurred, even though the idea was originally an American one.
There were also some missed opportunities for meetings when the US first toppled the Taliban with the help of Iran, and entered Iraq. Slavin points to the difficulty of now holding constructive talks after sanctions and demands for preconditions:
It’s no surprise, then, that U.S.-Iran talks about Iraq finally began in May this year in an atmosphere so fraught with hostility over sanctions and the nuclear issue that little has come of them. Iran, meanwhile, has refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program as demanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a precondition for broad negotiations. A top aide to Ahmadinejad recently told me that the Iranians think Rice is lying when she says she will meet with Iran “anywhere, anytime” if Iran suspends enrichment. The Bush administration, this official said, has no interest in serious negotiations with Iran. You can hardly blame him or other Iranians for thinking this way.
It did not have to be like this. The September 11 attacks opened opportunities for lessening hostility between Iran and the United States. Iranians, virtually alone among the world’s Muslims, demonstrated spontaneously in support of the United States following 9/11. Iran’s government then cooperated with the United States in backing Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, which captured Kabul from the Taliban in November 2001. Iran also helped put together a new government for Afghanistan in collaboration with U.S. diplomats.
When I visited Tehran in December 2001, politicians who previously had been wary of going on the record with a U.S. journalist said openly that the time was right to end nearly 30 years of U.S.-Iran estrangement. However, when I returned and discussed my impressions with a senior member of the White House National Security Council, he talked only of the fact that some al Qaeda members had managed to flee Afghanistan through Iran. Shortly thereafter, Israel captured a ship in the Red Sea carrying Iranian weapons said to be bound for Arafat’s Fatah faction. President Bush then decided to include Iran in his “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. Iranians who had advocated better relations with the United States were astonished and humiliated.
The White House did permit secret, direct talks between U.S. and Iranian diplomats in Europe from the fall of 2001 through May 2003. The talks, however, were tactical, not strategic. They ended in May 2003, after they were disclosed on the front page of USA Today; the administration seemed embarrassed to be caught talking to “evil.” At the same time, Iran put forward an agenda for comprehensive talks on all the issues dividing the two countries, including the nuclear program and Iran’s support for anti-Israel groups. But the Bush administration did not reply. Baghdad had just fallen, and a triumphant Bush believed he did not need Iran’s help in Iraq. Instead, Bush and Rice argued that a democratic Iraq would hasten the fall of neighboring autocratic regimes. At that time, Iran had no centrifuges spinning at Natanz, Iraq was not yet a bloody morass, and Iranian religious conservatives had not yet begun a rise to power culminating in the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005.
Irancove @ November 8, 2007