Tag Archives: Barbara Slavin

THE BATTLE OF THE BUSH GIANTS OVER IRAN part 1 of 2

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town at nightIn the previous two posts we looked at the fascinating yet fairly secretive years of gingerly cooperation between the United States and Iran that began in 1997 and ended abruptly in 2003. Much of this history remains unknown to most Americans, including how in 2001 Colin Powell, as George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, sought and got Iran’s tactical help to work with the CIA, the U.S. military, and the Northern Alliance to oust al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan.

If you were the president of the United States, wouldn’t you to try to keep building on that cooperation? After all, President Khatami of Iran had seriously proposed to do just that. But when Iran formally reached out to President Bush in May 2003 to do just that, President Bush crudely snubbed Iran. In this current series of posts, begun here, I am arguing why I believe that the snub could go down in history as the worst foreign policy decision in the history of the United States. It was a needless decision, the outcome of a battle of giants over Iran that had been brewing inside the Bush White House since 9/11.

The evening of September 11, 2001, Secretary Powell and a team of his closest advisors worked through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for Afghanistan, which became instrumental in getting Iran’s tactical help in Afghanistan to go after Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban. Beyond that tactical help, Powell wanted to persuade Iran to move into a positive strategic relationship with Washington.

Trita Parsi, in Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S., writes that Powell, Richard Armitage (Powell’s deputy), Larry Wilkerson (Powell’s chief of staff), and Ryan Crocker (a seasoned Middle East diplomat) had been working to build a proactive policy toward Iran, and they had incentive to push for a strategic opening with Iran after Iran’s tactical help in Afghanistan had paid off. But on Iran the Powell team faced ferocious opposition from Vice-president Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (a staunch neoconservative ideologue).

Flash forward to 2014.This year, President Obama has been chided from many quarters, including from his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for what many are calling his “Don’t do stupid stuff” foreign policy. We can’t enter that discussion here, but I mention it because “Don’t do stupid foreign policy stuff” is an apt descriptor for what happened to Iran policy inside the Bush White House in 2002-2003.

Despite the successes of Powell’s diplomatic initiatives in getting get Iran’s help with Afghanistan after 9/11, President Bush began leaning increasingly on the advice about Iran from  Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz – all adamantly opposed to Powell’s push to get Iran into a strategic relationship with the United States. Bush himself would begin to scotch that possibility big time, when, in his January 2002 State of the Union address, he included Iran, with North Korea and Iraq, as part of his “axis of evil.”

Needless to say, the Iranians were shocked. In his book Confronting Iran, Ali Ansari writes that “few Iranians could reconcile themselves with the notion that they belonged in the same category as their old foe Saddam Hussein or the totalitarian regime in North Korea.” And what then took place inside the Iranian government ensured the break in relations. For there was a battle of political giants playing out in Tehran just as there was in the Bush White House. And, just as occurred in the White House, the diplomats in Tehran lost to the hardliners.

We’ll pick the story up there in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Image by Olgierd Pstrykotworca (permission via Creative Commons)

IRAN & THE U.S., THE SECRET YEARS OF DIALOGUE & COOPERATION part 2 of 2

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doorway to autumnConcurrent with the mutual charm offensive from 1997-2003 between Washington and Tehran was the fascinating period of the so-called Six plus Two talks. Tentatively begun by the UN in 1997, Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, plus the United States and Russia, were quietly meeting to discuss dealing with the Taliban’s solidification of power over Afghanistan and the increasing violence among warring factions in that country. As well, Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network had recently been given safe haven there by the Taliban and were now working in various capacities with the Taliban government.

None of this bodes well for Shiite Muslim Iran. The al Qaeda network and the Taliban movement are radical Sunni Muslim Islamists, which meant that Iran had a deep stake in the Six plus Two talks. In 1998, Iran nearly went to war with the Taliban, and more than one million Afghan refugees had fled Taliban rule and were in the safekeeping of Iran, which has a very long eastern border with Afghanistan.

Iran helps the U.S. The Iran – U.S. narrative now begins to sound like a John LeCarré novel. After 9/11, Iran, in definitive ways through its considerable resources, began helping the CIA and the U.S. military to oust al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan. Iran was a major supporter of the Northern Alliance (NA), a motley group of anti-Taliban forces who were already at war with the Taliban, and through Iran’s help the NA now became the chief U.S. ally in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Iran also agreed to allow any U.S. pilots who were in distress to land on Iranian soil, if necessary, and it agreed to allow the U.S. to perform search-and-rescue missions for downed American pilots on its soil. Iran also increased its troop strength along the long Iran – Afghanistan border and, according to Trita Parsi, it sent a dossier to UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan on hundreds of al Qaeda operatives Iran had detained (Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.).

In October or November 2001, the Six plus Two forum had discreetly spun off one-on-one talks between Tehran and Washington to focus on closer cooperation about Afghanistan. Barbara Slavin (Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation) writes that more than a dozen secret meetings were held among a small, select group of high-level U.S. and Iranian diplomats (until the Bush administration rudely snubbed Iran in May 2003).

These secret meetings, Slavin writes, were cordial and professional and alternated between Geneva and Paris, often taking place in a hotel bar where the diplomats would chat over nonalcoholic drinks and potato chips. Parsi notes that the talks were dubbed the Geneva Channel and that the discussions were bilateral and at the highest level between officials of the two countries since the Iran-Contra scandal (mid-1980s). The talks included high-level Iranian diplomats and U.S. ambassadors Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalizad (both were senior Bush officials).

UN building (Jeffrey)Meanwhile, the Six plus Two group happened to be meeting at the UN in New York City just two months after 9/11, when American Airlines flight 587 crashed into a densely populated neighborhood in Queens shortly after taking off from JFK airport. Slavin writes that the assembled diplomats at first assumed another terrorist attack. She also reports that Karmal Kharrazi, Iran’s foreign minister, handwrote onto his prepared remarks the following words to a member of the U.S. delegation: “‘The United States should know that the Iranian people and the Iranian government stand with the United States in its time of need and absolutely condemn these violent terrorist attacks.’” Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, in New York City attending the annual UN General Assembly, told reporters that he hoped “this bitter event will be the last we will have, and that terrorism and hate will be replaced by coexistence, empathy, logic, and dialogue.”

Iran then proved to be crucial to the success of the Bonn Conference in December 2001, where, under UN auspices, an international delegation held meetings with prominent Afghan leaders to decide on a plan for governing Afghanistan, which had been without a nationally-agreed upon government since 1979. According to Parsi, Washington and Tehran had laid the groundwork for the conference weeks in advance, and at the conference it was the Iranian not the U.S. delegation which pointed out that the draft of the Bonn Declaration, which would create the new government, as yet contained no language on democracy. Slavin agrees that Iran played this key diplomatic role at the Bonn Conference, writing that Iran suggested that the draft communiqué call for democracy in Afghanistan and also declare that the new government should not harbor terrorists.

Parsi concluded that it was Iran’s influence over the Afghans, not America’s threats and promises, that moved the negotiations forward right up to the end of conference, when a crucial moment arose around a final sticking point with the NA about the high number of seats it should hold in the new government. Parsi writes that the issue seemed unresolvable and nearly scuttled reaching a final agreement until Iran’s lead negotiator, Javad Zarif, broke the deadlock by taking the NA delegate aside and whispering to him in Persian. A few minutes later they returned to the table, the NA inexplicably having agreed to give up two of the seats it wanted in the new government. (Zarif is currently Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Rouhani.)

For Iran, its enemy the Taliban had been defeated. For the United States, its relations with Iran had become less adversarial. The two governments had demonstrated to each other how they could benefit from improved bilateral relations. Apparently the historic season of cooperation, ongoing since 1997 in various ways, was creating a thaw between the two adversaries. This did not go unnoticed at the Powell State Department, where it was hoped that the common interests that both countries had shared in Afghanistan could be continued and expanded to other areas. But that would soon be scuttled by the neoconservatives in the George W. Bush White House, despite Powell’s best efforts. We’ll take a look at that part of the history in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Image by raffacama & Jeffrey respectively (permission via Creative Commons)

IRAN & THE U.S., THE SECRET YEARS OF DIALOGUE & COOPERATION part 1 of 2

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red and green building patternThe history of U.S. – Iran relations has traveled rough and tumble roads since 1979, when direct bilateral diplomatic relations ended with the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. But between 1997 and 2003, those relations were becoming a bit smoother. Unknown to most Americans, U.S. – Iran relations had been quietly, albeit gingerly, becoming slightly more cooperative during the closing years of the Clinton presidency when Madeleine Albright was U.S. Secretary of State.

This cautiously improving context was the one in which the George W. Bush White House snubbed the Iranian diplomatic reachout to the U.S. in May 2003. It soon became commonplace to blame that decision on the strong neoconservative element in the Bush administration. That seems right, and I want to explain why in a future post. But many people do not see the snub as foolish, largely, I think, because they are unaware that beginning in 1997 certain events and decisions taken by the U.S. and Iran were starting to thaw their relations. So I want us to look at that larger context here. We’ll return to the neoconservatives afterward.

Before there was the ranting sixth president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, there was the peaceable reformist politician and fifth president, Seyyed Mohammed Khatami (1997-2005). A surprise landslide election (70% of the vote) carried him into office and changed the tenor of Iranian politics.

Dialogue of civilizations. Khatami shaped a foreign policy around a remarkable initiative that he called “a dialogue of civilizations” and reached out regionally to the Sunni Arab world. As that began to lessen tensions between Shiite Persian Iran and Arab states, Khatami then too his dialogue farther afield and reached out to Europe and America. EU – Iranian relations improved, and a number of public speeches and warm comments from Khatami about the United States were reciprocated by President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright.

The signals being sent by both states were noteworthy, even if they indicated only the possibilities of a new beginning. But small practical steps ensued, although, as diplomatic correspondent Barbara Slavin puts it, Iran and the U.S. remained out of sync. In her book Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies Slavin discusses this wobbly dance between the U.S. and Iran during the Clinton – Khatami years.

Early in 1998, when he was unveiling his dialogue of civilizations, Khatami, in a major interview with Iranian-born CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, proposed cultural exchanges with the U.S. to chip away at what he called “the bulky wall of mistrust” between the two nations. In response, writes Slavin, the Clinton administration gave visas to Iranian filmmakers and university professors, and, wrestling being a popular sport in Iran, a team of U.S. wrestlers and their coaches flew to Tehran to compete in an international competition.

autumn cathedralIn September 1998, when Khatami was visiting America for the first time, attending the annual UN General Assembly, he praised President Clinton and got everyone’s attention when he said that the Iranian government would not carry out the death sentence (issued nearly ten years earlier by Ayatollah Khomeini) against Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie affair, he said, should be regarded as “completely finished.” Some commentators questioned why Khatami, as president, did not rescind the fatwa, or religious order, until they learned that since Khomenei had issued the fatwa only he could rescind it, and he had died shortly after he had issued it.

In 1999, the Clinton administration softened some U.S. sanctions on Iran, and on St. Patrick’s Day 2000, four days before the Persian New Year, Secretary Albright stunned the Iranians in a major speech in which she apologized for the role of the CIA in overthrowing Iran’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 and reinstalling the shah. She also said that U.S. support for Saddam Hussein [in the Iran – Iraq war, 1980-1989] had been “regrettably short-sighted,” and she hinted at a further easing of sanctions.

Albright also listed areas of mutual interest to the United States and Iran and hoped that the two nations could put aside their differences and “plant the seeds for anew and better future.” Although Albright also carefully include U.S. grievances against Iran, the speech, as Slavin writes, was “a major attempt to turn” Khatami’s dialogue of civilizations between America and Iran “into a true reconciliation.”

A number of Iranian gestures toward America ensued. Tehran stopped helping Baghdad smuggle oil in violation of UN sanctions. It toned down its anti-Israel rhetoric. It agreed to accept whatever final agreement the Palestinian leadership hammered out with Israel. The latter item was huge. By implying that it would in principle recognize a two-state solution, should that be the case, Khatami’s government was indirectly granting Israel recognition. Slavin recounts a conversation in which Javad Zarif, Iran’s then UN ambassador, and currently Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs under President Rouhani, affirmed that very point. Zarif said that although Iran does not officially recognize Israel, “We believe that that position is not incompatible with accepting whatever solution the Palestinians come up with.”

Ever hear the media or the pundits on talk radio discussing this stuff? I didn’t think so. I don’t want to give the impression that the picture turned rosy. Many thorny issues remained. But the progress was noteworthy enough that the gingerly improving bilateral relations, believe it or not, continued with President George W. Bush. We will pick up that part of this fascinating wobbly dance in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Ars Electronica & Nick Kenrick respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

THE UNITED STATES AND IRAN: AN ALLIANCE OF CONVENIENCE

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Surprised? Friday night (June 13) on the Charlie Rose television program, Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, laid out a case for the United States and Iran to work together to fight back ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) in Iraq. Saturday, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani publicly announced that Iran would consider joining forces with the United States to combat ISIS in Iraq. Today (June 16), Secretary of State John Kerry said that the United States is open to “any constructive process here that could minimize the violence, hold Iraq together.” Despite the core ideological differences between the two governments and their heated polemics toward each other in recent times this should not be happening, right? Frenemies? Iran and America? But this is not the first time in recent years that the two have worked together. Let me tell you a story.

Iran governemt buildingQuietly begun by the UN in 1997, the so-called Six plus Two talks included Iran, Pakistan, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, plus the United States and Russia. The purpose of the talks was to quietly discuss dealing with the Taliban’s solidification of power over Afghanistan and the increasing violence among warring factions in that country. Shiite Iran, in particualr, had a deep stake in these talks. The Taliban movement, not to mention Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan, were ultrafundamentalist Sunni Muslims who posed a real and present danger to neighboring Iran, with its very long eastern border with Afghanistan. Also,  droves of Afghan refugees were fleeing Taliban rule for Iran.

The Iran – U.S. narrative now begins to sound like a John LeCarré novel. Soon after 9/11, Iran, in definitive way through its considerable resources, began helping the CIA and the U.S. military to oust al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan. Iran was a major supporter of the Northern Alliance, a motley group of anti-Taliban forces who were already at war with the Taliban and who now became the chief U.S. ally in Afghanistan against al Qaeda and the Taliban. A tentative partnership that already existed between Iran and the Northern Alliance was helpful to the U.S. in its own partnership with the NA. Iran also agreed to allow any U.S. pilots who were in distress to land on Iranian soil, if necessary, and it agreed to all the U.S. to perform search-and-rescue missions for downed American pilots on its soil. Iran also increased its troop strength along the long Iran – Afghanistan border and, according to Trita Parsi, it sent a dossier to UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan on hundreds of al Qaeda operatives Iran had detained (Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.).

In October or November 2001, the Six plus Two forum had discreetly spun off one on one talks between Tehran and Washington to focus on closer cooperation about Afghanistan. Barbara Slavin writes that more than a dozen secret meetings were held among a small, select group of high-level U.S. and Iranian diplomats until the Bush administration rudely snubbed Iran in May 2003. These secret meetings, she writes, were cordial and professional and alternated between Geneva and Paris, often taking place in a hotel bar where the diplomats would chat over nonalcoholic drinks and potato chips. Parsi notes that the talks were dubbed the Geneva Channel and that the discussions were bilateral and at the highest level between officials of the two countries since the Iran-Contra scandal (Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation). The talks included U.S. ambassadors Ryan Crocker and Zalmay Khalizad (both were senior Bush officials) and high-level Iranian diplomats.

Meanwhile, on November 12, 2001, the Six plus Two group happened to be meeting at the UN in New York City when American Airlines flight 587 crashed into a densely populated neighborhood in Queens shortly after taking off from JFK airport. Slavin writes in Bitter Friends that the assembled diplomats at first assumed another terrorist attack. She also reports that Karmal Kharrazi, Iran’s foreign minister, handwrote onto his prepared remarks the following words to a member of the U.S. delegation: “‘The United States should know that the Iranian people and the Iranian government stand with the United States in its time of need and absolutely condemn these violent terrorist attacks’.” Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, in New York City attending the annual UN General Assembly meetings, told reporters that he hoped “this bitter event will be the last we will have, and that terrorism and hate will be replaced by coexistence, empathy, logic, and dialogue.”

Iran then proved to be crucial to the success of the Bonn Conference in December 2001, where, under UN auspices, an international delegation met with prominent Afghan leaders to decide on a plan for governing Afghanistan, which had been without a nationally-agreed upon government since 1979. According to Parsi in Treacherous Alliance, Washington and Tehran had laid the groundwork for the conference weeks in advance, and that at the conference it was the Iranian not the U.S. delegation which pointed out that the draft of the Bonn Declaration, which would create the new government, as yet contained no language on democracy. Slavin agrees that Iran played a very supportive role at the Bonn Conference in the diplomatic area. It was Iran, she writes, that suggested that the draft communiqué call for democracy in Afghanistan and declared that the new government should not harbor terrorists.

Parsi concludes that it was Iran’s influence over the Afghans, not America’s threats and promises, that moved the negotiations forward right up to the end of conference. This was a crucial moment because of a final sticking point with the Northern Alliance about the high number of seats it should hold in the new government. This could not be resolved and nearly scuttled reaching a final agreement, Parsi writes, then noting that it was Iran’s lead negotiator, Javad Zarif, who broke the deadlock, but only by taking the Afghan delegate aside and whispering to him in Persian. A few minutes later they returned to the table, the Northern Alliance inexplicably having agreed to give up two of the seats it wanted in the new government. (Zarif is now Rouhani’s foreign minister.)

the white houseFor Iran, its enemy the Taliban had been defeated. For the United States, its relations with Iran had become less adversarial. Both governments had demonstrated to each other how they could benefit from an improved bilateral better relationship. This historic season of cooperation between the two adversaries, which had been taking place in other ways since 1997, did not go unnoticed at the Powell State Department, where it was hoped that the common interests that both countries had shared in Afghanistan could be expanded to other areas.

Then Secretary of State Colin Powell was arguing for this at the White House, against adamant opposition from then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The evening of September 11, 2001, for instance, Powell and a team of close advisors had worked through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for Afghanistan. It immediately became central to U.S. plans in its war on terrorism. Parsi writes that the plans included initiating the kind of cooperation with Iran that would be used as a platform for persuading Tehran to move beyond its tactical help into a positive strategic relationship with Washington. Iran’s tactical help in Afghanistan after 9/11 had made its strategic help at least something worth talking about with Iran.

With Iran’s tactical help in Afghanistan paying off, the Powell State Department pushed for a strategic opening with Iran. Powell, Richard Armitage (Powell’s deputy), and Larry Wilkerson (Powell’s chief of staff) had been trying to build a proactive policy toward Iran, but, as Slavin writes, the three faced continual ferocious opposition from Rumsfeld, Vice-president Dick Cheney, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. President George W. Bush however, would begin to scotch that possibility in his 2002 State of the Union address, when he included “Iran” in his “axis of evil” (with Iraq and North Korea).

In May 2003, the Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz cabal had succeeded in killing the Powell strategy. President Khatami, despite Bush’s axis of evil speech, was still trying to build better relations with the U.S., and he had persuaded the Iranian regime to take a huge risk in the direction. The regime sent a formal diplomatic letter to the Bush administration seeking the start of direct high-level talks on a wider array of issues crucial to improving the bilateral relations.

The unprecedented offer was immediately rebuffed by the Bush White House, and the ultrafundamentalists in Tehran quickly used the snub to undermine the credibility of Khatami, his team, and other reformist politicians who had been sticking their necks out since 1997 for friendlier relations with the United States. And the rest, as they say, is history, beginning with another surprise election, that of the radical and controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June 2005.

“This is where things get into the land of the unbelievable,” Haass admitted to Rose.
“We’re going to be on the same side as Iran helping the Iraqi government…. As crazy as this sounds, the moment may have come.” Or, as that great political prophet Mark Twain once said, “History may not repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.” The question is, What is the end rhyme?

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by Stefan Krasowski and Adam_Inglis, respectively (permission via Creative Commons)