US-Iran Thaw: Is it for Real?

R.K. Ramazani writes on the signs of a US-Iran “thaw” and asks ”Is it for Real?” Read the extended essay here.
To get you started, I offer a few personalized accents:

On March 10, the representatives of the United States and Iran faced each other in a regional conference in Baghdad, Iraq. The event has raised crucial questions. Is this a real shift away from the Bush administration’s dogged stance against talking to Iran, allegedly “the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism”?
Is it a real change in American strategy or is it a tactical gimmick, one of pretending to pursue diplomacy while preparing for confrontation and war?…

The Professor first hones in on problems that I have noted here repeatedly, issues central to my own work:

“The Bush administration has adamantly refused to talk to Iran, claiming that to do so would bestow legitimacy on its revolutionary regime.
Even a novice in world politics would know that a regime’s legitimacy is given or withheld by a combination of international and domestic acceptance. Muhammad Reza Shah’s international legitimacy was in effect bestowed by America rather than by the international community. He lost his throne ignominiously because the Iranian people no longer trusted him.”

One wonders how Secretary Rice will explain that talking to Iran now doesn’t contradict her previous statements.
Ramazani laments that the U.S. blew off a serious offer from Iran in 2003 – the “grand bargain” by which Iran offered concretely to resolve all outstanding issues between the US and Iran, ranging from terrorism to a two-state solution for Palestine to nuclear aspirations. Secretary Rice lately has been less than candid in her own lamely parsed testimony claiming that she doesn’t recall such an offer. Such denials have prompted two former top aides of hers to accuse her of prevaricating.
That “little” matter aside, the fact that US and Iranian officials can admit to talking at all, courtesy the Iraqis, is an important, if precarious development. At least the two sides can belatedly and in the same room admit to having much common ground in Iraq. But Ramazani then warns that

“these expressions of common interest between Iran and the United States may yet founder on shoals of inveterate hostility and mistrust that have developed over the past half a century. It was not always that way.”

Ramazani reminds us that for the century prior to 1953, Iranians generally had a profoundly favorable view towards America. Dating to the first half of the 1800’s,

“American traders, scholars, economists and even missionaries left lasting, positive imprints in Iran. By 1881, Iran took the initiative to establish diplomatic relations with America. The United States responded positively by introducing a bill in Congress, arguing that America could serve its national interest by establishing diplomatic relations with “the oldest government in the world” and a country of “great strategic importance.”

I well remember my own wonderment in 1992 when I first encountered an ornate and centrally placed mausoleum for the American Art Historian, Arthur Upham Pope, on the banks of Iran’s Zayandeh River, within sight of the magnificent Khaju Bridge in Esfahan.
Even American missionaries, civil servants, and Ambassadors, from Howard Baskerville to Morgan Shuster to Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. (sic) left legacies as empathetic defenders of Iranian independence against British, Russian and Soviet era encroachments.
America most of all stood out as a land of freedom and democracy, an example to be emulated. But America frittered away such goodwill when the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Muhammad Musaddiq in 1953 and returned Muhammad Reza Shah to his throne.
Thus began the long, awful cycle of recrimination, suspicion, revolution, and reaction. The Shah’s excesses were blamed on his American patrons; such alienations spurred on a revolution that went to its own extremes in “eradicating” residual American “domination;” American diplomats were taken hostage for fear the US might restore the Shah to the throne; the U.S. tacitly backed Saddam Hussein’s long war with Iran; and Iranian reformers today struggle to maintain their internal “legitimacy,” untainted by American monetary support – the “kiss of death.”
Despite a few previous glimmers of hope, our current President Bush has largely “added fuel to the fire of decades of mistrust…”

“His repeated denunciation of the Iranian regime, his criticism of the Iranian electoral process, his frequent threat of military strikes against Iranian nuclear sites and now his gunboat diplomacy in Iran’s back yard in the Persian Gulf have added to his insult of placing Iran in his axis of evil.”

Yet like the pending annual spring hopes for Nowruz, the present slight thaw might yet bloom into direct, comprehensive Iranian-American negotiations, “if the leaders on both sides will it.”
Ramazani finds guarded hope in the emergence of “voices of reason” in both Tehran and Washington who have “broken the taboo” of talking to the other side. If confidence building takes root, the century-old tradition of amity might yet spring forth, to the benefit of both sides.

“An historic return to the tradition of U.S.-Iran friendship and mutual trust could immensely facilitate the realization of common American and Iranian interests in the stability of Iraq, in greater security of Persian Gulf oil supplies for world markets and, above all else, in the removal of the threat of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and beyond.”

As the first President Bush proclaimed hopefully towards Iran in his 1989 Inaugural: “Goodwill begets goodwill.” It’s a sound concept, still worth trying.