Category: Iran

My heart aches for Shaul Bakhash and Haleh Bakhash, respectively the husband and daughter of the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who has been detained in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for the past couple of months.
This week, Iran’s state television has been airing a two-part series featuring material from interviews conducted with Esfandiari and with Kian Tajbakhsh, another detained Iranian-American who’s been working on urban planning issues in Iran under contract for George Soros’s Open Society Institute. A slide show accompanying that AP story has image grabs from the series. In them, you can see Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh talking with an apparently off-camera interviewer… But the interviews are reportedly all cut up and edited to be intercut with material about the (US-supported) Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similarly US-supported ‘people power’ movements in other countries, to give the impression that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are admitting that their activities have been part of some nefarious plot to use their ‘people-to-people’ contacts with their own compatriots in Iran to foment instability and revolution inside Iran.
I find that ‘confessions’ made by people under arrest or detention and broadcast or otherwise publicized by their jailers are always a stomach-turning business. In these images, we see Esfandiari, who normally appears in public immaculately made-up and carefully dressed in her very professional clothing, sitting on a sofa in a black chador with no make-up and looking very tired.
I happen to be a person who doesn’t like to wear make-up. But I recognize that for many women, it is an important part of the way they appear in public; and I should imagine for Esfandiari and her family it may be very demeaning and disquieting for her to appear in public like that.
The content of these interviews, which the Iranian authorities are apparently trying to persuade everyone are ‘true confessions’, is probably nothing more than coerced or carefully edited and re-edited garbage. And we should probably all treat them like that.
At least, though, we do see these two detained people on our screens. Their families say they have lost weight and have been kept in physical conditions far, far worse than the comfy-looking sitting-room where they appear to have been filmed. But they certainly don’t look as if they’ve been treated anywhere near as badly as the US’s former detainees in Abu Ghraib (for example). And they have reportedly been allowed to have short but fairly regular phone contact with one friend or family member each throughout their detention, which is being undertaken by the Iranian authorities during the conduct of a judicial investigation into their activities in Iran.)
Meanwhile, in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, US government agencies are holding thousands of detainees, with most of them being held completely outside of the sphere of anything resembling due process. These detainees include five Iranian diplomats, who were held for some months before they were even given access to the consular service of the government they represented. It is probably also fair to guess that a large proportion of the detainees being held by the US in these places have not had the opportunity to inform their families of the fact or location of their place of detention, let alone to have any form of phone access to their families.
The families of those detainees are every bit as human, and as anguished, as Shaul and Haleh Bakhash. So while my heart goes out to those two, and while of course I hope that Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh are either freed unconditionally or brought with due speed to a fair trial, still I wish exactly the same for all those detainees held by the US and its surrogates, and for their families.
Sadly, the US government, which US citizens might hope would be in a great position to petition other governments in defense of the rights of US citizens unfairly detained in other countries, currently has no credibility whatsoever in this matter. Maybe US citizens should understand that when our government abuses the rights of others, it puts all of us who travel overseas at great risk?
My hope for Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh is that these nauseating broadcast ‘confessions are– as with the British sailors back in March– a precursor to the Iranian government releasing them. But who knows?
And my hope for all the detainees held quite unfairly by my own government is that they too can either speedily win either their complete freedom or at least their day in a fair and duly constituted court of law.

In the post I put up here in the wee hours of this morning, I was writing about the (perhaps fairly divergent) assessments that the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council, Gen.Mohsen Rezai, and the US reporter Michael Hirsh have of the likelihood that President George W. Bush might, within the 18 months remaining in his presidency, enact a “dramatic” shift towards de-escalating the US’s currently still high level of tension with Iran.
This morning, I just went back into that post to clarify the paragraph dealing with that issue a little bit.
I started to add in my own assessment of the likelihood of such a shift, but then I realized that was fairly diversionary from the main thrust of the post. Plus, it meant that my own assessment got buried ways down near the bottom of the post. Bad idea!
So here’s my assessment of the likelihood of such a shift. I would it put it at above 50%, for the following reasons:

1. With every week that passes there is still a fairly high chance of either a fairly catastrophic event befalling some portion of the US forces distributed widely throughout Iraq, or a much broader catastrophic collapse of the entire US position in Iraq (through collapse of the supply lines, or whatever.) In the event of such a catastrophe, which could– if it occurs while the US troops are remain as widely and vulnerably distributed as they have been under the “surge”– directly threaten the lives of many hundreds of US soldiers, the US authorities will feel a strong need to do whatever it takes to stabilize the situation in Iraq and find a way to concentrate their forces back within more easily defensible perimeters prior to extracting a good portion or perhaps all of them completely.
It is important to “realize” at this point that the US citizenry really doesn’t believe in this “mission” in Iraq any more, whatever it is. That means they (we) would be very upset– to put it mildly– by any further large-scale US losses at all. We are also now deep into the next election.
“Whatever it takes” most certainly could (and in my view, should) include talking seriously to the Iranians about all the outstanding matters at issue between the two nations. (The agenda of the whole Grand Bargain, that is.)
2. The faction now becoming more powerful within the Bush administration is not composed of neoconservative ideological numbskulls like those who controlled the presidency from 2001 until recently. Condi Rice might continue to reveal herself as an intellectual (and moral) lightweight. But Cheney’s influence has been waning appreciably, while Defense Secretary Gates– who is a realist in strategic affairs much more than he’s an ideologue– has quietly been increasing his degree of control over the levers of strategic decisionmaking. (He was even able to force the early exit of Joint Chiuefs Chauir Peter Pace. That was a good sign.)
I would wager that Gates and those who are working with him are acutely aware of the risks described in #1 above. From Gates’s point of view, as someone who presumably wants to do the best possible job he can under the lousy circumstances he agreed to take on last November, avoiding those kinds of catastrophe would be far, far better than responding to them.

I should also note that there’s another aspect of this question to be addressed, linked to the dynamics of next year’s phase of the US election, when the contest may really heat up in a polarized, party-political way.
We absolutely should not assume that the Democrats would be more dove-ish, on issues relating to Iran, than the Republicans. This, because of the much stronger role that pro-Israel lobby money has within the Democratic Party than in the GOP.
That is, the Dems might be more noticeably more dove-ish than the Republicans on issues linked to Iraq alone; but put Iran’s strategic weight into the mix there as well and the matter becomes far less clear-cut.
So the pro-Grand Bargain Iranians (such as Rezai seems to be) may well prefer to at least start the talks on the GB agenda as soon as possible, so that the Bushites (Gates-ites?) don’t have as much fear that by sitting down with “the mullahs of Tehran” they might get badly mauled next year by the mutually competing Democratic candidates. By then, the Bushites might even hope to have some significant achievements they could point to, from their diplomacy with Iran.
For a US administration that has as few achievements as the Bushites currently have– especially after their immigration reform plan went down in flames last week–I am sure the attractions of pulling off some kind of a “Nixon to China” diplomatic/strategic coup with Iran must seem pretty alluring to at least some of the more intelligent and visionary people inside the administration? But I think they’d better get this underway pretty fast.
Maybe Rezai should put just a little more on the table to tempt Washington to act quickly?

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.