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Here are a few items for your files with background on how we’ve gotten
to this rush to war/diplomatic standoff with Iran. Perhaps the speed with which the internet allows historians and foreign
correspondents to analyze and broadcast information outside the confines of
officialdom will feed the democratic process and deny a small power elite another
secret agenda launch. kwc 052706 Bush
administration debates talks with Iran http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/world/middleeast/27iran.html The former German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor joins the chorus
of voices, including Kissinger’s, urging talks with Tehran, here in a Monday
morning OpEd in the Washington Post: 052906 Joschka Fisher The Case for Bargaining with Iran http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/28/AR2006052800978.html Short version from Inter Press Service news agency of a story the
mainstream media hasn’t managed to tell yet: Iran Proposal
to U.S. Offered Peace with Israel: Iran offered in 2003
to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian
armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's
1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United
States. The
two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues
separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed
to the United States in late April
or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy
at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who
provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier
this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source. Longer version details the 2001 neocon war hawk voices in
the Bush administration focussed on those ‘axis of evil’ states: Burnt
Offering
How a 2003 secret overture from Tehran might have led to a deal on
Iran’s nuclear capacity - if the Bush administration hadn’t rebuffed it. By Gareth Porter, American Prospect, June 06 2006 Issue Iran’s “mad mullahs”
want nuclear weapons to destroy Israel and can only be stopped by the threat or
use of military force. That’s what the Bush administration would have the
public believe, as it pushes toward a confrontation with Iran over that
country’s nuclear program. A key link in the argument is that Tehran has shown
no interest in negotiating over the nuclear issue. As State Department
spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters last January, the administration didn’t
then see “anything that indicates the Iranians are willing to engage in a
serious diplomatic process” on the nuclear issue. In the woeful history
of falsehoods about the targets of potential U.S. force, however, this one is
particularly egregious. In the spring of 2003, the Islamic Republic of Iran not
only proposed to negotiate with the Bush administration on its nuclear program
and its support for terrorists but also offered concrete concessions that went
very far toward meeting U.S. concerns. The story of that
Iranian negotiating proposal and the U.S. failure to respond, which has never
been covered by major U.S. media, reveals the underlying pragmatism driving
Iranian policy toward an agreement with the United States. It also reveals a fierce struggle
between realists who wanted to engage Iran diplomatically and the inner circle
of advisers who were determined to avoid it. The stubborn rejection by President Bush and his
neoconservative advisers of normal diplomatic practice in their dealings with
Iran, detailed for the first time here, raises grave questions about the Bush
administration’s real motives as it maneuvers through the present crisis over
Iran’s nuclear program. The
Post–9-11 Opportunity With Iran
Almost from the beginning of Bush’s presidency, two groups in the
administration were waging an intense struggle over Iran, while the U.S.
government went month after month without an official policy. Those officials
who wanted to try diplomacy had a champion in Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, a close confidante of Secretary of
State Colin Powell. Armitage had lived in Tehran for several months in 1975 as
part of a Pentagon team trying to restrain the shah’s arms purchases, and he
was “very interested” in Iran, according to Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence
Wilkerson. One of the reasons Armitage brought Middle East specialist Richard
Haass into the department as head of the Office of Policy Planning, Wilkerson
says, was to work on a new policy toward Iran. Haass, for four years
the senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the
National Security Council under the first President Bush, began in the summer
of 2001 to explore the possibilities for engaging Iran diplomatically, first
through the easing of economic sanctions imposed in 1996 under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. But by the time
the State Department was focused on the problem, it was already too late: The bill re-imposing those sanctions had
been introduced in the House on January 3, 2001, even before Bush’s
inauguration, and had no fewer than 250 co-sponsors. A source who worked on the
issue at the time says the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had been
focusing on the legislation for months. The bill passed overwhelmingly in July
2001. The September 11
attacks created an entirely new strategic context for engagement with Iran. The
evening of 9-11, Flynt Leverett, a career CIA analyst who was then at
the State Department as a counter-terrorism expert, and a small group of
officials met with Powell. It was the beginning of work on a diplomatic
strategy in support of the U.S. effort to destroy the Taliban regime in Afghanistan
and the al-Qaeda network it had harbored. The main aim was to gain the
cooperation of states that were considered sponsors of terrorism. “The United States was
about to mount a global war on terrorism with complete legitimacy from the
United Nations,” recalls Leverett, “and these states didn’t want to get on the
downside of it.” Within
weeks, Iran, Syria, Libya, and Sudan all approached the United States through
various channels to offer their help in the fight against al-Qaeda. “The
Iranians said we don’t like al-Qaeda any better than you, and we have assets in
Afghanistan that could be useful,” Leverett recalls. It was the beginning
of a period of extraordinary strategic cooperation between Iran and the United
States. As America began preparing for the military operation in Afghanistan,
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Ryan Crocker held
a series of secret meetings with Iranian officials in Geneva. In those
meetings, Iran offered search-and-rescue help, humanitarian assistance, and
even advice on which targets to bomb in Afghanistan, according to one former
administration official. The Iranians, who had been working for years with the
main anti-Taliban coalition, the Northern Alliance, also advised the Americans
about how to negotiate the major ethnic and political fault lines in the
country. The Iranian-U.S.
strategic rapprochement continued to gain momentum in November and December
2001. In early December, at a conference in Bonn to set up a post-Taliban Afghan
government, Iran pressed its allies in the Northern Alliance to limit their
demands for ministerial seats and even made sure antiterrorism language was
included in the agreement, according to U.S. Special Envoy James Dobbins. Leverett agrees. “The Bonn Conference would not have been successful
without [Iran’s] cooperation,” he says. “They had real contacts with the players on the ground in Afghanistan,
and they proposed to use that influence in continuing coordination with the
United States.” The Office of Policy
Planning had written a paper in late November arguing that the United States
had “a real opportunity” to work more closely with Iran on al-Qaeda. It
proposed exchanges of information and coordinated border sweeps, requiring no
more than sharing tactical intelligence on al-Qaeda with Iran, with the
expectation that even more valuable intelligence would come from the Iranians.
That proposal was supported by the CIA as well as from the White House
coordinator on counterterrorism, Wayne Downing. The strategy advocated
by Haass and Leverett, with the encouragement of Armitage and Powell, was to
use the new desire of states still listed as sponsors of terrorism --
especially Iran and Syria -- to cooperate with the United States to press for
larger changes in policy. The idea, Leverett recalls, was to “have broader
conversations with them about support for terrorist groups and say, ‘We will
take you off the state-sponsors-of-terrorism list if you do the following.’” With Iran, such
discussions would also have to cover the country’s nuclear program. The Policy
Planning staff had been putting together options that would revolve around
different levels of incentives, ranging from modest benefits such as support
for Iran’s membership in the World Trade Organization to a more comprehensive
offer that would include security guarantees, according to a source familiar
with the proposal. Wilkerson describes the resulting plan for a dialogue with
Iran as having “quite a lot of detail.” Neoconservatives
Strike Back
The post-9-11 period was the most promising moment for a U.S. opening
to Iran since the two countries cut their relations in 1979. But
neoconservatives had no intention of letting the engagement initiative get off
the ground, and they were well-positioned to ensure that it didn’t. The main drama around
Iran policy in late
2001 was played out
in the White House, where the drafting of the State of the Union message was
under way and where the neoconservatives held sway. The inclusion of Iran in
the “axis of evil” was at first opposed by then–National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, because, as Hadley told
journalist Bob Woodward, Iran, unlike Iraq or North Korea, had a “complicated
political structure with a democratically elected president.” But Bush had
already made up his mind; regime change was the goal. A stronger, more
self-confident national security adviser would have insisted that an
ill-informed President consider the pros and cons of making such a far-reaching
foreign-policy decision on the basis of a half-baked concept, and perhaps
insist on intelligence advice on the matter. But Rice had already earned a
reputation among national security officials for always staying in Bush’s good
graces by taking whatever position she believed he would favor. “She would
guess which way the President would go and make sure that’s where she came
out,” says Wilkerson, who watched her operate for four years. “She would be an advocate up to a point, but her
advocacy would cease as soon as she sniffed the President’s position.” Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led the neoconservative push for
regime change. But it was Douglas Feith, the abrasive and aggressively
pro-Israel undersecretary of defense for policy, who was responsible for
developing the details of the policy. Feith had two staff members, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, who spoke Farsi, and a third, William Luti, whom one former U.S. official recalls being
“downright irrational” on anything having to do with Iran. A former
intelligence official who worked on the Middle East said, “I’ve had a couple of
Israeli generals tell me off the record that they think Luti is insane.” In December 2001,
Feith secretly dispatched Franklin and Rhode to Rome to meet with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the shady Iranian arms dealer in the
Iran-Contra affair, and other Iranians. Administration officials later told
Warren P. Strobel of the Knight Ridder media chain that they had learned that
among those Iranians were representatives of the Mujahadeen e Khalq (MEK), a
paramilitary organization Saddam had used for acts of terror against non-Sunni
Iraqis and Iran. In December, the
question of policy toward the state sponsors of terrorism was taken up by the
“deputies committee” made up of Hadley, who served as chairman, Armitage,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and a deputy to CIA Director George
Tenet. The outcome was already foretold. “It
was decided that to engage with these states was a concession to terrorism, a
reward for bad behavior,” Leverett recalls. In rules for dealing
with Iran and Syria, referred to informally as the “Hadley Rules,” the committee further decreed that there
could be no sharing of intelligence information or any other cooperation on
al-Qaeda, although the states in question could be asked to provide information
or other cooperation unilaterally. The new rules put U.S. policy toward Iran in a straitjacket requiring that Iran could never be
treated as a sovereign equal on any issue. It was clear to State
Department officials that no progress could be made toward engaging Iran
without a formal Iran policy that would supersede the Hadley Rules. In early
2002, Leverett worked on a draft National
Security Presidential Decision (NSPD) calling for diplomatic
engagement. But Feith’s staff came up with their own revised version of the
draft, which turned into a policy of regime change, according to Leverett. The
engagement group wanted Rice to hold an interagency meeting and force the issue,
but she failed to do it, according to both Leverett and Wilkerson. The neoconservatives had prevailed
through a costly policy default on Iran. The
Iranians Try For A Grand Bargain
Bush’s axis-of-evil speech was followed by public charges and press leaks
from the administration that Iran was deliberately “harboring” al-Qaeda cadres
who had fled from Afghanistan. In fact, the Iranians had made a serious effort
to cooperate with Washington on al-Qaeda, according to Leverett. When the
administration requested that the Iranian government send more guards to the
Afghan border to intercept al-Qaeda cadres, Iran did so. And when Washington
asked Iran to look out for specific al-Qaeda leaders who had entered Iran, Iran
put a hold on their visas. The effect of the Bush
administration’s signals of hostility was to discredit the idea of cooperation
with Washington as a means of obtaining U.S. concessions to Iranian interests.
Reflecting the mood in Tehran, in May 2002, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei denounced the idea of negotiations with the United States as useless. But Iranian calculations were dramatically
altered by the impending U.S. attack on Iraq. In late 2002, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay
Khalilzad met with Iranian officials in Geneva, asked for assistance for any
American pilots downed in Iranian territory, and requested that Iran refrain
from putting forces into Iraq. Journalist Afshin Molavi was told by Iranian
sources that the Iranians agreed to both requests but insisted on a pledge by the
United States not to attack Iran after it had removed Saddam, to which
Khalilzad gave an equivocal answer. Iranian national
security officials were convinced that the Bush administration intended to move
against their country once the United States had consolidated its position in
Iraq. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies who has had extensive interviews with
officials of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council as well as the Foreign
Ministry, says, “They believed if they didn’t do something, Iran would be
next.” The only way Iranian officials could head off that threat was to offer
Washington things it needed in return for things that Iran needed. In early
2003, the Iranians believed they had three new sources of bargaining
leverage with Washington: the huge potential influence in a post-Saddam Iraq of the
Iranian-trained and anti-American Iraqi Shiite political parties and military
organizations in exile in Iran; the Bush administration’s growing concern about
Iran’s nuclear program; and the U.S. desire to interrogate the al-Qaeda leaders
Iran had captured in 2002. This is about half of the article. Read
online at http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11539 Or contact me if you prefer a reader friendly copy. Gareth Porter, a historian and journalist,
writes regularly on U.S. policy in Iran and Iraq for Inter Press Service. His
most recent book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance
of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University
of California Press, 2005). |
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