Page 4 of 4 A real success story in the
US's Iraq: Iran By Peter Galbraith
Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim
Guldimann, for negotiations on a package deal in
which Iran would freeze its nuclear program in
exchange for an end to US hostility. The Iranian
paper offered "full transparency for security that
there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or
possess WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and full
cooperation with the IAEA based on Iranian
adoption of all relevant instruments".
The
Iranians also offered support for "the
establishment of
democratic institutions and a
non-religious government" in Iraq; full
cooperation against terrorists (including "above
all, al-Qaeda"); and an end to material support to
Palestinian groups such as Hamas. In return, the
Iranians asked that their country not be on the
terrorism list or designated part of the "axis of
evil"; that all sanctions end; that the US support
Iran's claims for reparations for the Iran-Iraq
War as part of the overall settlement of the Iraqi
debt; that they have access to peaceful nuclear
technology; and that the US pursue anti-Iranian
terrorists, including "above all" the MEK. MEK
members should, the Iranians said, be repatriated
to Iran.
Basking in the glory of "Mission
Accomplished" in Iraq, the Bush administration
dismissed the Iranian offer and criticized
Guldimann for even presenting it. Several years
later, the Bush administration's abrupt rejection
of the Iranian offer began to look blatantly
foolish and the administration moved to suppress
the story. Flynt Leverett, who had handled Iran in
2003 for the National Security Council, tried to
write about it in the New York Times and found his
article crudely censored by the National Security
Council, which had to clear it. Guldimann,
however, had given the Iranian paper to Republican
congressman Bob Ney, now remembered both for
renaming House of Representatives cafeteria food
and for larceny. (As chairman of the House
Administration Committee he renamed french fries
"freedom fries" and is now in federal prison for
bribery.)
I was surprised to learn that
Ney had a serious side. He had lived in Iran
before the revolution, spoke Farsi, and wanted
better relations between the two countries. Parsi,
Ney's staffer in 2003, describes in detail the
Iranian offer and the Bush administration's
high-handed rejection of it in his wonderfully
informative account of the triangular relationship
among the US, Iran and Israel.
Four years
later, Iran holds a much stronger hand while the
mismanagement of the Iraq occupation has made the
US position incomparably weaker. While the 2003
proposal could not have been presented without
support from the clerics who really run Iran,
Iran's current president, Ahmadinejad, has made
uranium enrichment the centerpiece of his
administration and the embodiment of Iranian
nationalism. Even though Ahmadinejad does not make
decisions about Iran's nuclear program (and his
finger would never be on the button if Iran had a
bomb), he has made it politically very difficult
for the clerics to come back to the 2003 paper.
Nonetheless, the 2003 Iranian paper could
provide a starting point for a US-Iran deal. In
recent years, various ideas have emerged that
could accommodate both Iran's insistence on its
right to nuclear technology and the international
community's desire for iron-clad assurances that
Iran will not divert the technology into weapons.
These include a Russian proposal that Iran enrich
uranium on Russian territory and also an idea
floated by US and Iranian experts to have a
European consortium conduct the enrichment in Iran
under international supervision.
Iran
rejected the Russian proposal, but if hostility
between Iran and the US were to be reduced, it
might be revived. (The consortium idea has no
official standing at this point.) While there are
good reasons to doubt Iranian statements that its
program is entirely peaceful, Iran remains a party
to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its
leaders, including Ahmadinejad, insist it has no
intention of developing nuclear weapons. As long
as this is the case, Iran could make a deal to
limit its nuclear program without losing face.
From the inception of Iran's nuclear
program under the shah, prestige and the desire
for recognition have been motivating factors.
Iranians want the world, and especially the US, to
see Iran as they do themselves - as a populous,
powerful and responsible country that is heir to a
great empire and home to a 2,500-year-old
civilization.
In Iranian eyes, the US has
behaved in a way that continually diminishes their
country. Many Iranians still seethe over the US
involvement in the 1953 coup that overthrew the
government of democratically elected prime
minister Mohammad Mossadegh and reinstated the
shah. Being designated a terrorist state and part
of an "axis of evil" grates on the Iranians in the
same way.
In some ways, the 1979-81 US
Embassy hostage crisis in Tehran and Iran's
nuclear program were different strategies to
compel US respect for Iran. A diplomatic overture
toward Iran might include ways to show respect for
Iranian civilization (which is different from
approval of its leaders) and could include an open
apology for the US role in the 1953 coup, which,
as it turned out, was a horrible mistake for US
interests.
While Bush insists that time is
not on the United States' side, the process of
negotiation - and even an interim agreement -
might provide time for more moderate Iranians to
assert themselves. So far as Iran's security is
concerned, possession of nuclear weapons is more a
liability than an asset. Iran's size - and the
certainty of strong resistance - is sufficient
deterrent to any US invasion, which, even at the
height of the administration's post-Saddam
euphoria, was never seriously considered.
Developing nuclear weapons would provide Iran with
no additional deterrent to a US invasion but could
invite an attack.
Should al-Qaeda or
another terrorist organization succeed in
detonating a nuclear weapon in a US city, any US
president will look to the country that supplied
the weapon as a place to retaliate. If the origin
of the bomb were unknown, a nuclear Iran - a
designated state sponsor of terrorism - would find
itself a likely target, even though it is
extremely unlikely to supply such a weapon to
al-Qaeda, a Sunni fundamentalist organization.
With its allies now largely running the
government in Baghdad, Iran does not need a
nuclear weapon to deter a hostile Iraq. An Iranian
bomb, however, likely would cause Saudi Arabia to
acquire nuclear weapons, thus canceling Iran's
considerable manpower advantage over its Gulf
rival. More pragmatic leaders, such as former
president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, may understand
this. Rafsanjani, who lost the 2005 presidential
elections to Ahmadinejad, is making a comeback,
defeating a hardliner to become chairman of Iran's
Assembly of Experts for the Leadership (Majles-e
Khobrgran Rahbari), which appoints and can dismiss
the supreme leader.
At this stage, neither
the US nor Iran seems willing to talk directly
about bilateral issues apart from Iraq. Even if
the two sides did talk, there is no guarantee that
an agreement could be reached. And if an agreement
were reached, it would certainly be short of what
the US might want. But the test of a US-Iran
negotiation is not how it measures up against an
ideal arrangement but how it measures up against
the alternatives of bombing or doing nothing.
US prewar intelligence on Iraq was
horrifically wrong on the key question of Iraq's
possession of WMD, and Bush ignored the
intelligence to assert falsely a connection
between Saddam and September 11, 2001. This alone
is sufficient reason to be skeptical of the Bush
administration's statements on Iran.
Some
of the administration's charges against Iran defy
common sense. In his Reno speech, Bush accused
Iran of arming the Taliban in Afghanistan while
his administration has, at various times, accused
Iran of giving weapons to both Sunni and Shi'ite
insurgents in Iraq. The Taliban are
Salafi-jihadis, Sunni fundamentalists who consider
Shi'ites apostates deserving of death. In power,
the Taliban brutally repressed Afghanistan's
Shi'ites and nearly provoked a war with Iran when
they murdered Iranian diplomats inside the Iranian
consulate in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Iraq's Sunni insurgents are either Salafi-jihadis
or Ba'athists, the political party that started
the Iran-Iraq War.
The Iranian regime may
believe it has a strategic interest in keeping US
forces tied down in the Iraqi quagmire since this,
in the Iranian view, makes an attack on Iran
unlikely. US clashes with the Mahdi Army
complicate the US military effort in Iraq and it
is plausible that Iran might provide some weapons
- including armor-penetrating improvised explosive
devices - to the Mahdi Army and its splinter
factions. Overall, however, Iran has no interest
in the success of the Mahdi Army.
Muqtada
has made Iraqi nationalism his political platform.
He has attacked the SIIC for its pro-Iranian
leanings and challenged Iraq's most important
religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani,
himself an Iranian citizen. Asked about charges
that Iran was organizing Iraqi insurgents, Iran's
Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told The
Financial Times on May 10, "The whole idea is
unreasonable. Why should we do that? Why should we
undermine a government in Iraq that we support
more than anybody else?"
The US cannot now
undo Bush's strategic gift to Iran. But
importantly, the most pro-Iranian Shi'ite
political party is the one least hostile to the
US. In the battle now under way between the SIIC
and Muqtada for control of southern Iraq and of
the central government in Baghdad, the US and Iran
are on the same side. The US has good reason to
worry about Iran's activities in Iraq. But
contrary to the Bush administration's allegations
- supported by both General David Petraeus and
Ambassador Ryan Crocker in their recent
congressional testimony - Iran does not oppose
Iraq's new political order. In fact, Iran is the
major beneficiary of the US-induced changes in
Iraq since 2003.
Peter W
Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia,
is senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms
Control and a principal at the Windham Resources
Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its
clients in post-conflict societies, including
Iraq. His The End of Iraq: How American
Incompetence Created a War Without End is now
out in paperback.
(This essay appears
in the October 11, 2007, issue of the New York Review of Books
and is posted with the permission of the editors
of that magazine.)
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