NEW YORK - In 2007, after eight months of detention in Iran - four in solitary
confinement in Tehran's Evin prison - Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari
returned to the United States and held a press conference at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, where she directs the Middle East Program.
When the floor was opened, the first questioner asked if Esfandiari - a
long-time advocate of engagement with the Islamic Republic - still supported
talks with Iran after her imprisonment there on false charges of fomenting a
"velvet revolution".
"I always have and will advocate talks between governments," Esfandiari said,
"be it the Iranian government and the United States or any other government. I
think governments should talk
to each other."
But Esfandiari may have spoken too soon - she now says engagement should be put
on the back burner.
On July 15, at the 92nd Street Y cultural institution in Manhattan, Esfandiari
was among three prominent Iran experts and previously staunch supporters of
engagement with Iran who have changed their tunes since the disputed June 12
election and its violent aftermath.
After 30 years of enmity when the US and Iran had no formal relations, said
Esfandiari, she did not see the harm in waiting for a period - she suggested
six months - to see how things shake out on the ground in Iran.
But, as Esfandiari acknowledged, it appears that the US has already made up its
mind to engage the Islamic Republic.
In what was billed as a major, comprehensive foreign policy speech last
Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the US remained
committed to engagement with all actors, including Iran.
While acknowledging that recent events in Iran had "certainly shifted"
prospects for success, Clinton remained steadfast: "The choice is clear. We
remain ready to engage with Iran."
"But," she warned, "the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain
open indefinitely."
In contrast, all three of the experts on the 92nd Street Y panel said just the
opposite: that engagement should not occur now, but the door should be open to
it later.
Echoing Esfandiari, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow Karim
Sadjadpour, who has also advocated engagement, said he was reconsidering past
positions. "For the first time, I'm against engagement," at least for now, he
said.
But National Iranian American Council (NIAC) president Trita Parsi said
engagement might not need to be put completely on hold. "I still think that
engagement is the policy to pursue, but I don't think we have to rush into it,"
Parsi told Inter Press Service.
"What you want to avoid doing is have engagement in a manner that can tilt the
balance in either direction when it comes to the internal political situation
in Iran," he said. "That, in my view, means that broad diplomatic engagement
has to wait a little while."
"If we are going wait for the dust to settle, as [US President Barack Obama]
has said, then we should wait for the dust to settle," Parsi said, noting, "The
opposition has not given up." But he said that certain talks, like the
multilateral nuclear talks, could possibly go on.
Roger Cohen, the New York Times columnist who was one of the last Western
journalists on the streets of Tehran despite the fact that his press pass - but
not his visa - had been revoked, admitted that other considerations had to be
brought into the conversation about engagement.
"The strategic imperative for engagement remains," he said, noting Iran's
"pivotal place in the region".
Iran's influence is apparent in many of the countries of interest to the US.
Iran is allied with important states and actors in the Arab-Israeli arena -
where the US is making robust peace efforts - and Iraq and Afghanistan, where
the US is respectively winding down and ramping up wars.
One of the top strategic concerns is Iran's nuclear program, which it claims is
peaceful, but which adversaries - including, notably, close US ally Israel -
have charged is aimed at production of nuclear weapons.
However, the nuclear clock, noted Efandiari, will continue to tick whether or
not the US engages - and experts debate the possible timeframe for Iranian
weapons capability.
Parsi said that engagement on the nuclear issue didn't have to be put aside
entirely, noting that a UN Security Council's "Iran Six" group - not solely the
US - were conducting the ongoing nuclear negotiations. The group comprises the
US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany.
Parsi said putting the full brakes on those talks could be complicated: "It's
difficult for the US to say that without being in a [former president] George W
Bush administration position again."
For most of his tenure, Bush roundly opposed talking to Iran, even through
international bodies, labeling the country as part of an "axis of evil" in his
2002 State of the Union address, along with North Korea and Iraq.
Many advocates of continuing a plan of robust engagement, among them so-called
foreign policy "realists", cite historical precedents in dealing with US
adversaries, such as engagement with China despite its 1989 crackdown on
protesters in Tiananmen Square.
In a recent article, the New America Foundation's (NAF) Flynt Leverett noted
that the Iranian crackdown following massive demonstrations against the
disputed re-election of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad had "far less bloodshed"
than Tiananmen Square.
Or as his NAF colleague Steve Clemons half-joked: "America has a rich history
of dealing with thugs."
But some Iran experts have dismissed the comparisons.
"Tehran was not Tiananmen Square," said Esfandiari. "People went and voted and
their votes were stolen. It was a different thing."
According to Cohen, some of the realist strategic concerns must be put on the
back burner. "There's also a moral imperative now," he said. "So long as people
are being killed in Iran ... clubbed by the thousands, I don't think it can be
business as usual."
Parsi also said that engagement that can bolster Ahmadinejad over the
opposition, led by the ostensible losing candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, would
be folly.
Citing Esfaniari's comment that Iranian security services were worked up into a
frenzy of "paranoia" about a velvet revolution, Cohen questioned whether US
talks with Iran could bear any fruit right now. "I don't think Iran has a
national security team right now," Cohen said. Such a cohesive group would be
necessary to engagement on security issues. "They're in disarray," Cohen said,
because they're dealing with the internal situation.
Cohen suggested waiting until at least autumn to make an attempt at engagement,
at which time, he said, all the issues had to be put on the table at once.
"This is such a messed-up relationship," he said, pointing to decades of
hostility and traumatic events like 1953 Central Intelligence Agency-backed
coup in Iran and the 1979 hostage crisis in Tehran that was televised nightly
in the US for more than a year.
"We need to get past the psychosis," Cohen said. "That looks very remote to
me."
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