Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh had an important piece in today’s WaPo, reporting on the fact that Gen. Mohsen Rezai, the former head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and the secretary of the country’s extremely powerful Expediency Council, had called him in and given him some important messages to (as it seems) pass on the Bushites.
Rezai seemed to support the proposal made by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei that Iran might commit to a moratorium, halt, or “timeout” (in US sports parlance) of its uranium enrichment program.
Hirsh:
- “What it means is for Iran to stay at the [enrichment] level it has reached, with no further progress. By the same token, the U.N. Security Council will not issue another resolution,” said Rezai, who indicated that the idea is gaining support inside the Iranian regime. “The Iranian nuclear issue has to be resolved through a new kind of solution like this.”
And this:
- Rezai’s effort at outreach suggests that the policy of diplomatic coercion being pursued by the United States, Britain, France and Germany is working, at least to some degree. Iran has grown weary of its economic and political isolation, and senior officials in Tehran remain preoccupied with the possibility of a U.S. military strike. Now Iran is eager to satisfy ElBaradei’s demands for further clarity on the illicit history of its program — so much so that [Iranian chief nuclear negotiator Ali] Larijani met twice with him last week.
What is not clear is whether the Bush administration will accept a “timeout,” as opposed to a full suspension of Iran’s enrichment activities. It also is not clear, despite Rezai’s hopes, that Bush has given up on regime change; hence the “presidential finding” Bush recently signed that authorizes the CIA to conduct non-lethal operations to harass the Iranian regime. Having isolated Tehran diplomatically, the Bush administration seems content to simply wait until it “caves.”
But my 10-day visit to Iran in late June, mostly spent in Tehran, convinced me that any hopes that Iran will just give up are badly misguided…
Hirsh reviews the history of the gestures the Iranians have made to the Americans since 9/11, primarily in late 2001 and in 2003– and of their having been rudely rebuffed by the Bushites on both those earlier occasions.
He adds:
- The Bush team is in danger of letting the current opening from Iran pass it by as well. The administration doesn’t seem to recognize that diplomatic coercion by itself can’t work — not with a country that has turned its nuclear program into a national crusade. And one hears little acknowledgment from senior U.S. officials that the United States and Iran share some critical interests. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a June 8 roundtable with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, called the U.S.-Iranian relationship “overall rather zero-sum” and confessed that she couldn’t figure Iran out. “I think it’s a very opaque place, and it’s a political system I don’t understand very well,” she said.
I guess I had missed reading any reports of those remarks. Goodness, if Condi really did describe the relationship as “rather zero-sum” that really does show how very mediocre her own intellect and information base are.
Amazing and disturbing, too, that she would confess in semi-public that she didn’t much understand the political system in a country as vital to the security of that vital part of the world as Iraq!
Hirsh continues:
- It is this impression of inevitably clashing interests that Rezai was trying hard to dispel. He pointed out that his is the only country that can help Washington control Shiite militias in Iraq, slow the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan and tame Hezbollah’s still-dangerous presence in Lebanon all at once. “If America pursues a different approach than confronting Iran, our dealings will change fundamentally,” he said.
My conversations with hard-liners and reformers inside Tehran also suggested something deeper: that under the right circumstances, Iran may still be willing to stop short of building a bomb. “Iran would like to have the technology, and that is enough for deterrence,” says S.M.H. Adeli, Iran’s moderate, urbane former ambassador to London.
And what of other overlapping interests? Let’s start with Iraq, the one area where Washington does seem to acknowledge it needs Tehran’s help, even as the administration continues to accuse Iran of delivering sophisticated makeshift bombs to Iraqi militants. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government “is of strategic importance to us,” Rezai said. “We want this government to stay in power. Rival Sunni countries oppose Maliki. We haven’t.”
… Of course, the elephant in the room is Iran’s toxic relationship with Israel, especially President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denial that the Holocaust happened and his threats toward a U.S. ally. But several Iranian officials hinted that Ahmadinejad crossed a red line in Iranian politics when he pushed his rhetoric beyond the official hope that Israel would one day disappear to suggest that Tehran might help that process along. A new Iranian president would rebalance that position, they indicated.
Still, the Iranians themselves recognize that a more dramatic shift in policy is unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch. “Mr. Bush’s government is stuck at a crossroads” between confrontation and engagement, “and it can’t make a decision,” Rezai said. “We have a saying in Farsi: When a child walks in darkness, he starts singing or making loud noises because he’s afraid of the dark. The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran, and that’s why they’re making a lot of loud noises.” Whether or not that’s true, new noises are clearly coming from Tehran. Washington should listen.
I am interested in that word “recognize” that Hirsh uses at the top of that last paragraph. As someone who frequently reports (as well as opines), I am acutely aware of the fact that the apparently descriptive verbs that a reporter uses in her/his writing often also convey the reporter’s own attitude to the truth-value of what is being said, or judged, or argued, or whatever. So when Hirsh writes that the Iranians “recognize” that a more dramatic shift of US policy toward their country is “unlikely to happen on Bush’s watch”, that clearly conveys Hirsh’s own very pessimistic view regarding that likelihood. (As opposed to writing, for example, that the Iranians “judge” the shift to be unlikely, or “consider” it to be so; neither of which verbs would convey Hirsh’s own view on the substance of the matter.)
And then, the Rezai quote that Hirsh plugs in, apparently to support the (value-loaded) statement he has just made there, in fact does not tell us that Rezai, being one influential Iranian, has made any such judgment about the likelihood of a dramatic shift on Bush’s watch. Instead, Rezai is quoted as saying merely that Bush is “at a crossroads”; and then we have that little Farsi saying, adduced to back up Rezai’s assertion that “The Americans are afraid to negotiate with Iran.”
My bottom line, therefore, is that Hirsh has not provided any evidence that sheds any light on what this influential Iranian thinks about the “likelihood” of a dramatic shift in US policy on Bush’s watch. Rezai may consider it likely, or unlikely. We do not know. But even if he considers it “unlikely” (i.e. a probability of < 50%; but maybe only, say, 45%), that has apparently still not stopped him from making his overture through Hirsh at this time, i.e., with 18 months more of the Bush presidency to run.
… Rezai also said something there about Iran’s support for the Iraqi government headed by Nouri al-Maliki. Regarding Iran’s close relations with another key political figure the US relies on inside Iraq, Juan Cole today had a little post on his blog with a video clip of a very jovial Iraqi President Talabani visiting his Iranian counterpart, Pres. Ahmadinejad, recently.
No surprise there for me. (But maybe for Condi?) We should all, surely, remember that Talabani, Abdel-Aziz Hakim, Ahmad Chalabi, and other stalwarts of the neocons’ plans to invade Iraq in 2003 have been close allies of the mullahs’ regime in Iran — and also of Baathist Syria– for far, far longer than they have ever been “friends” of the US, in any way, shape, or form. (Hakim– who has been relentlessly pumped up by US military spinmeisters as “the most powerful member of the Shiite alliance for the past four years, notwithstanding much evidence to the contrary, now seems to be dying of cancer in a clinic in– you guessed!– Iran… And his son Ammar, who now seems to be in line to replace him, will most likely continue in his father’s footsteps.)
But back to the main topic here: the overture from Rezai. What he was spelling out quite clearly to Hirsh were the main dimensions of what some people call the possible “Grand Bargain” between Washington and Tehran, in which Iran’s nuclear program, stability in Iraq, and other regional-stability issues would all be put on the table and resolved together.
Would such a “Grand Bargain” be a good idea? You bet it would! Certainly, it would be far, far better for everyone concerned– Iraqis, Americans, Iranians, and many others in and beyond the Middle East– than any escalation of tensions, or even (heaven forbid!) war, between these two countries.
Of course, any Grand Bargain that involved only these two governments would most likely arouse the suspicions and defensiveness, and outright opposition, of many others in the region, especially predominantly Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan that have been Washington’s “traditional” allies in the region for many decades. (And also of Israel, though I tend to think that Israel can look after itself.)
That’s why embedding a US-Iranian Grand Bargain within a broader process of regional peacemaking that also involves the Iraqi government, all of Iraq’s other neighbors, and other important regional and world powers– and to have a newly empowered UN convene this process– makes the most sense… As I have long argued, here and elsewhere.
But none of this can work without a serious rapprochement taking place between Washington and Tehran. Twenty-six years after the end of the large-scale hostage crisis between the two powers it surely is time they both started acting like responsible adults?
Rezai is strongly indicating that Iran is prepared to do so. But are the Bushites? That is still the question. It is one for which, day after day after day, Iraqis and US soldiers will continue to die in Iraq.