Flynt Leverett on Bush’s Iran mis-steps

Flynt Leverett, who was a White House/ National Security Council insider at the beginning of the first Bush administration, wrote an important piece in the NYT today in which he identified three crucial occasions on which the administration “turned away from [an] opportunity to put relations with Iran on a more positive trajectory.”
These were:

    In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Tehran offered to help Washington overthrow the Taliban and establish a new political order in Afghanistan. But in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that Iran was part of an “axis of evil,” thereby scuttling any possibility of leveraging tactical cooperation over Afghanistan into a strategic opening.
    In the spring of 2003, shortly before I left government, the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve bilateral differences. The document acknowledged that Iran would have to address concerns about its weapons programs and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. It was presented as having support from all major players in Iran’s power structure, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A conversation I had shortly after leaving the government with a senior conservative Iranian official strongly suggested that this was the case. Unfortunately, the administration’s response was to complain that the Swiss diplomats who passed the document from Tehran to Washington were out of line.
    Finally, in October 2003, the Europeans got Iran to agree to suspend enrichment in order to pursue talks that might lead to an economic, nuclear and strategic deal. But the Bush administration refused to join the European initiative, ensuring that the talks failed.

So, decisions like those have consequences. (Didn’t anyone explain the theory of “consequences” to the Prez during some of his 12-step gatherings?)
As Leverett writes:

    Now Washington and its allies are faced with two unattractive options for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue. They can refer the issue to the Security Council, but, at a time of tight energy markets, no one is interested in restricting Iranian oil sales. Other measures under discussion – travel restrictions on Iranian officials, for example – are likely to be imposed only ad hoc, with Russia and China as probable holdouts. They are in any case unlikely to sway Iranian decision-making, because unlike his predecessor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disdains being feted in European capitals.
    Alternatively, the United States (or Israel) could strike militarily at Iran’s nuclear installations. But these are spread across Iran, and planners may not know all of the targets that would need to be hit. Moreover, a strike could prove counterproductive by hardening Iranian resolve to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity…

As I mentioned here earlier, the President really is faced with a tough dilemma in this Iranian-nuclear business.
Leverett has his proposal for what might be done. It envisages the creation of a “Gulf Security Council”, involving all the Gulf states as well as (though he doesn’t really explain why) all five of the Security Council’s permanent members. His idea is that this body could negotiate an agreement for creating a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Gulf, perhaps linked to a future such zone covering the whole of the Middle East.
Phew, lucky old Israel! That would get it off the hook of having to denuclearize for quite a while yet, wouldn’t it?
Actually, right now only one power has nuclear weapons in the Gulf. It’s the US of A, whose carrier battle groups always, as a matter of course, include warships armed with nuclear-tipped SLBMs.
So maybe what would be needed is a US-Iranian negotiation to start with. One in which the US could, at a very minimum, give Iran the very valuable “negative” security guarantee, to the effect that it has no intention of attacking Iran militarily and seeks to resolve all outstanding issues of concern with Iran through peaceful means?
I think such a declaration from the US would do a lot to help launch a fruitful negotiation with Teheran. Oh, that, and a similar undertaking from Israel…
If we just go by the past performance of the Bush administration, as spelled out by Flynt Leverett, however, it doesn’t look as though it’s about to resolve its differences with Iran through peaceful means…
How come they’re willing to join in a negotiation with Kim Jong-Il, but they’re not willing to negotiate with Iran, anyway? (Oops, don’t tell me that that’s because Kim already has those nasty kind of weapons that the Iranians don’t have?)

8 thoughts on “Flynt Leverett on Bush’s Iran mis-steps”

  1. The most sensible course would be to offer to Iran meaningful incentives to forego ambiguous nuclear research, e.g. remove present sanctions, support Iran membership in the WTO, etc. Instead Bush has locked the US into this “axis of evil” rhetoric, which of course is reasonably understood by Iran to mean its eradication. Isn’t that what one does to evil – eradicate it? It doesn’t surprise me, and it shouldn’t anyone, that Iran reciprocates with its own eliminationist rhetoric. “You reap what you sow.” So this current deadlock is as much our making as anyone’s, and according to Leverett, moreso ours.

  2. ‎“Actually, right now only one power has nuclear weapons in the Gulf. It’s the US ‎of A, whose carrier battle groups always, as a matter of course, include warships ‎armed with nuclear-tipped SLBMs.”‎
    Yah, this story might regard as one of the environmentally pollutions caused by those carrier ‎battles.‎
    In let 2000, there were massive dead fish syndrome in the gulf especially in Kuwaitis coast ‎accordingly Kuwaitis authority announced to the public not to eat sea fish when there were a considerable of dead fish found across the Kuwaitis coast.‎
    Then this news went salient as the government promised for to get some specialist to ‎investigate the reasones for the dead fish on the coast.‎
    One possible cause may be a leakage of some sort of materials related to those carrier ‎battles.‎
    Also the high rise of cancer related illness between the public in the gulf countries ‎after the gulf war 1991 indicates there is reasons behind that rise.‎

  3. “Also the high rise of cancer related illness between the public in the gulf countries ‎after the gulf war 1991 indicates there is reasons behind that rise.”
    Salah,
    It couldn’t possibly be all that depleted uranium that the US forces used in the original Gulf War, and that they continue to use with impunity in their “conventional” weapons, could it ?

  4. Elizabeth over at “Fit to Print” also has a commentary on the Leverett op-ed:
    http://watchingthetimes.blogspot.com/2006/01/few-details-missing.html
    The “hissing” of Sir Michael Quinlan mentioned in your earlier post was extremely illustrative…I linked to the J. Post article, and from there clicked on the huge ad for the upcoming AIPAC conference, which American political luminaries and faithful friends of Israel will be gracing with their presence…this is a big part of the problem.

  7. vadim,
    Your link give those sick and not real causes after Gulf War 1990 about all health issues in the ME specially in Gulf States, this is very understandable, I would to bring your attentions to the Gulf War Syndrome that US troops suffered. By keeping these acquisitions of fires of oil field cause all the health issues its just ridicules and it’s incensed.
    What’s about the recent oil fire in Brittan when the smokes reached Franc and Germany, is it can cause rise in cancer and other health issues their?
    vadim read blow by William R. Polk, he is one of the respectable official in US what he said about Gulf War 1990

    When the Baghdadis read their press or listen to their radios, they are in no
    doubt the real meaning of statements that America intends to shower this city with 300 or 400 cruise missiles a day. For them, that is not a statistic; it is a mortal threat. And it is not the worst possible vision of the immediate future. There is also talk of using tactical nuclear weapons, so-called “bunker busters,” which even children here know would spew out clouds of radioactive dust. Although it was not fully understood at the time and has been little discussed since, the first Gulf War had a nuclear component too. The shells fired by tanks, artillery and even some aircraft were usually made of depleted uranium 238. Each tank shell, for example, contained over 4,500 grams of solid uranium, which, being heavier than iron, was considered more effective against armoured vehicles. In the Gulf War, some 300 tons of such shells, some of which apparently also contained plutonium, were fired. Unfortunately, they were effective not only against armor. And not only against those actually hit. Wherever they were used, they set in motion a process that resulted in a
    marked increase of malignancy among adults, both soldiers and civilians. Children were particularly vulnerable; worst of all, infants were sometimes born with horrible defects. Little as we Westerners have heard of these things, they are common talk in Iraq.

    BAGHDAD ON THE BRINK OF DESTRUCTION
    Roger Stevenson, thanks my friend I think the above very obvious for you and other that US in 1990 used much polluted materials in the war.

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