Iran offered 'to make peace with
Israel' By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - 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 a secret
Iranian proposal to the United States.
The
two-page proposal for a broad Iran-US agreement
covering all the issues separating the two
countries, a copy of which was obtained by Inter
Press Service (IPS), was conveyed to the US in
late April or early May 2003.
Trita Parsi,
a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced
International Studies who provided the document to
IPS, says he got it from an Iranian
official this year but is not
at liberty to reveal the source.
The
two-page document contradicts the official line of
the Bush administration that Iran is committed to
the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of
terrorism in the region.
Parsi says the
document is a summary of an even more detailed
Iranian negotiating proposal that he learned about
in 2003 from the US intermediary who carried it to
the State Department on behalf of the Swiss
Embassy in late April or early May that year. The
intermediary has not yet agreed to be identified,
Parsi said.
The negotiating proposal
indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give
up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the
region in return for a larger bargain with the
United States. What the Iranians wanted in return,
as suggested by the document itself as well as
expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to
US hostility and recognition of Iran as a
legitimate power in the region.
Before the
2003 proposal, Iran had criticized Arab
governments that had supported the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating
document, however, offered "acceptance of the Arab
League Beirut Declaration", which it also referred
to as the "Saudi initiative, two-states approach".
The March 2002 Beirut Declaration
represented the Arab League's first official
acceptance of the land-for-peace principle as well
as a comprehensive peace with Israel in return for
Israel's withdrawal to the territory it had
controlled before the 1967 war. Iran's proposed
concession on the issue would have aligned its
policy with that of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, among
others with which the United States enjoyed
intimate relations.
Another concession in
the document was a "stop of any material support
to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad,
etc) from Iranian territory" along with "pressure
on these organizations to stop violent actions
against civilians within borders of 1967".
Even more surprising, given the extremely
close relationship between Iran and the
Lebanon-based Hezbollah Shi'ite organization, the
proposal offered to take "action on Hezbollah to
become a mere political organization within
Lebanon".
The Iranian proposal also
offered to accept much tighter controls by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in
exchange for "full access to peaceful nuclear
technology". It offered "full cooperation with
IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant
instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA
protocols)".
That was a reference to
protocols that would require Iran to provide IAEA
monitors with access to any facility they might
request, whether it had been declared by Iran or
not. That would have made it much more difficult
for Iran to carry out any secret nuclear
activities without being detected.
In
return for these concessions, which contradicted
Iran's public rhetoric about Israel and
anti-Israeli forces, the secret Iranian proposal
sought US agreement to a list of Iranian aims. The
list included a "halt in US hostile behavior and
rectification of status of Iran in the US", as
well as the "abolishment of all sanctions".
Also among Iran's aims was "recognition of
Iran's legitimate security interests in the region
with according defense capacity". According to a
number of Iran specialists, the aim of security
and an official acknowledgment of Iran's status as
a regional power were central to the Iranian
interest in a broad agreement with the United
States.
Negotiation of a deal with the US
that would advance Iran's security and fundamental
geopolitical political interests in the Persian
Gulf region in return for accepting the existence
of Israel and other Iranian concessions has long
been discussed among senior Iranian
national-security officials, according to Parsi
and other analysts of Iranian national security
policy.
An Iranian threat to destroy
Israel has been a major propaganda theme of the
Bush administration for months. On March 10,
President George W Bush said, "The Iranian
president has stated his desire to destroy our
ally, Israel. So when you start listening to what
he has said to their desire to develop a nuclear
weapon, then you begin to see an issue of grave
national-security concern."
But in 2003,
Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian
offer to negotiate an agreement that would have
accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett,
then the senior specialist on the Middle East on
the National Security Council staff, recalled in
an interview that it was "literally a few days"
between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and
the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador
expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to
Washington.
Interest in such a deal is
still very much alive in Tehran, despite the US
refusal to respond to the 2003 proposal. Turkish
international-relations professor Mustafa
Kibaroglu of Bilkent University writes in the
latest issue of Middle East Journal that "senior
analysts" from Iran told him last July that "the
formal recognition of Israel by Iran may also be
possible if essentially a 'grand bargain' can be
achieved between the US and Iran".
The
proposal's offer to dismantle the main thrust of
Iran's Islamic and anti-Israel policy would be
strongly opposed by some of the extreme
conservatives among the mullahs who engineered the
repression of the reformist movement in 2004 and
who backed President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in last
year's election.
However, many
conservative opponents of the reform movement in
Iran have also supported a negotiated deal with
the United States that would benefit Iran,
according to Paul Pillar, the former national
intelligence officer on Iran. "Even some of the
hardliners accepted the idea that if you could
strike a deal with the devil, you would do it," he
said in an interview last month.
The
conservatives were unhappy not with the idea of a
deal with the United States but with the fact that
it was a supporter of the reform movement of
former president Mohammad Khatami who would get
the credit for the breakthrough, Pillar said.
Parsi says the ultimate authority on
Iran's foreign policy, Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, was "directly involved" in the
Iranian proposal, according to the senior Iranian
national-security officials he interviewed in
2004. Khamenei has aligned himself with the
conservatives in opposing the pro-democratic
movement.
Gareth Porter is a
historian and national security policy analyst.
His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in June 2005.
