A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (30 page)

The opportunities for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement in the wake of the 9/11 attacks were real and substantial. In their December 28, 2001, op-ed in the
Washington Post,
Middle East experts John Newhouse and Thomas Pickering identified Iran as the first and most important of what they called the “big opportunities” resulting from 9/11. Citing the various forms of cooperation between the two countries, they predicted that “the turmoil that has long agitated U.S.-Iranian relations could begin to give way, if only gradually, to a balanced and productive relationship between two societies that have more in common than either cares to admit.”

The benefits from such a rapprochement were self-evident and potentially region changing. According to Newhouse and Pickering:

Iran could become a stabilizing influence in a congenitally unstable region. It has attributes unique to the region: rudimentary but real politics based on free elections; a legitimate government; a history and culture all its own; and uncontested borders fixed by that experience, rather than imposed by other governments. Iran has had its revolution and never come close to imploding. Support for the hard-line Islamist clerics who came to power in that revolution has dwindled. Iran is a largely moderate and pro-American society.

They explained that “Iran wants to be treated by the United States as a normal country and a respectable player within the international system” and identified multiple incentives the United States could offer that would be critical to the Iranians and which could serve as the basis for an overarching agreement. They concluded: “Friendly and productive relations between Iran and the United States can and should evolve.”

The post-9/11 U.S.-Iranian rapprochement extended beyond Afghanistan. The 2003 Congressional Research Service Report also documented that “Iran was also quietly helpful in the U.S. effort to oust Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.” Saddam, of course, had invaded Iran in 1980 and then prosecuted a brutal and merciless war, including the savage use of chemical weapons, and he brutally repressed Iraqi Shiites in the south who maintained close ethnic and religious ties to Iran. Few countries could have expected to benefit more from the removal of Saddam than Iran, and with the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Iranians and the U.S. thus once again found themselves with aligned interests.

That Iran cooperated meaningfully and closely with the United States in the wake of the 9/11 attacks is not in dispute. There are, however, differing views of Iran’s motives for doing so. The Bush administration and its most vehement anti-Iranian supporters claim that Iran did this only because Iran perceived the fanatical Sunni Taliban regime as a threat and was motivated by its own interests to see that regime defeated. They make the same claim regarding Iran’s tacit acceptance of the American war to depose Saddam.

Others, including Flynt Leverett, a former CIA analyst who became a senior director for Middle East policy on the Bush National Security Council, disagree with that assessment, arguing instead that Iran’s cooperation with the U.S. over Afghanistan was motivated by Iran’s desire for a closer and more constructive overall relationship with the U.S. As Leverett wrote in a December 2006 op-ed in the
New York Times,

The argument that Iran helped America in Afghanistan because it was in Tehran’s interest to get rid of the Taliban is misplaced. Iran could have let America remove the Taliban without getting its own hands dirty, as it remained neutral during the 1991 Gulf war. Tehran cooperated with United States efforts in Afghanistan primarily because it wanted a better relationship with Washington.

But one does not need to resolve this dispute over Iran’s motives in order to draw the most important conclusion. Iran is a rational state actor, which, like most other countries in the world—including American allies—will eagerly cooperate with the United States when their interests converge with ours. It is empirically true that Iran and the U.S. are perfectly capable of working toward the same common goals, and it is empirically false that the Iranians are pursuing an agenda of pure anti-American Evil divorced from rational considerations of their own interests and/or driven by some sort of apocalyptic goal of destruction of the United States.

To know that a country and its leaders act rationally is to take a huge and critical step toward realizing that that country—no matter how internally repressive it might be—cannot and will not be a threat to the U.S. As “evil” as the U.S. government always maintained the Soviet Union was, we did not wage war on the Soviets but instead relied upon their rationality—i.e., their knowledge that they could not wage war on the U.S. without suffering full-scale (albeit mutual) annihilation.

The Iranians, with a military force that is a tiny fraction of the Soviet army, know this as well. That they are rational and that they act in their self-interest demonstrates by itself the absurdity of claiming that they are a threat to the security of the United States. Independently, to demonstrate a country’s rationality is to demonstrate that it is susceptible to negotiations and agreements when it perceives such matters to be in its interest (which is, of course, the only time anyone, individual or nation, enters into an agreement).

Indeed, even
after
President Bush declared Iran to be a member of the “axis of evil” in January 2002, Iran continued to pursue a working relationship with the U.S. beyond the Afghanistan issue. The
Financial Times
reported that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, in April 2002, “has quietly authorised the Supreme National Security Council to assess the merits of starting talks with the U.S.”

And in 2003, the Iranians made an extraordinary overture with the hope of achieving full-scale rapprochement with the U.S. In April of that year—almost immediately after the U.S. military had overrun Baghdad—the Iranian government made an unsolicited offer to the Bush administration with the hope of resolving all significant sources of conflict between the two countries, including the state of Iran’s nuclear program. In mid-2006, the
Washington Post
’s Glenn Kessler obtained the Iranian document and reported:

Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table—including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.

That offer was sent to the U.S. by the Swiss ambassador, who has been acting as the mediator for all U.S.-Iran communications ever since formal diplomatic relations ended during the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. When he conveyed the letter, the Swiss ambassador vouched that it “was an authoritative initiative that had the support of then-President Mohammad Khatami and supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei.”

In the document, the Iranian government signaled a broad and flexible willingness to negotiate, and reach agreement on, the full panoply of issues to which the Bush administration had objected:

The document lists a series of Iranian aims for the talks, such as ending sanctions, full access to peaceful nuclear technology and a recognition of its “legitimate security interests.” Iran agreed to put a series of U.S. aims on the agenda, including full cooperation on nuclear safeguards, “decisive action” against terrorists, coordination in Iraq, ending “material support” for Palestinian militias and accepting the Saudi initiative for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The document also laid out an agenda for negotiations, with possible steps to be achieved at a first meeting and the development of negotiating road maps on disarmament, terrorism and economic cooperation.

Trita Parsi, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Kessler that Iranian flexibility included even their posture toward Israel: “Iranians were ready to dramatically soften their stance on Israel, essentially taking the position of other Islamic countries such as Malaysia.” (The official Malaysian policy toward Israel, shared by many Middle Eastern countries, is that it does not recognize Israel’s right to exist but would consider relations with Israel once an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is reached.)

The Bush administration not only failed to respond to the Iranian overture but actually dismissed it out of hand. Worse, they went out of their way to belittle the offer and insult the Iranians for making it by formally complaining to the Swiss ambassador, telling him it was inappropriate even to convey such an offer on behalf of the Iranians.

In the midst of cooperating with the United States on critical matters, the Iranians came—hat in hand—to negotiate every issue generating U.S.-Iranian conflict, including Israel and the Iranian nuclear program, and the Bush administration refused even to come to the table. It is thus true that, at least over the last five years, one party to the U.S.-Iran conflict has been beyond reason and negotiation, but it is clearly not the Iranians.

The Bush administration’s categorical refusal to speak with Iran back in 2003 is especially baffling given that prompting conciliatory gestures of this sort from hostile Middle Eastern governments was ostensibly one of the key objectives in invading Iraq. War advocates endlessly contended that once other Middle Eastern countries saw how strong and resolute the United States was in the post-9/11 world—once we overthrew the Iraqi tyrant and showed that we were willing to get our hands dirty in a real fight—other countries in that region would realize that they had no choice but to become more conciliatory and cooperative with the U.S., driven by the fear that they could be the next Iraq.

The 2003 accord between the United States and Libya was held up as the classic model for this theory. Repeatedly, the conciliations made by Libyan leader Muammar al-Gadhafi were pointed to by Bush officials as an illustrative, successful example of this “Show of Force” strategy. On December 19, 2003, President Bush convened the media at the White House to announce what he excitedly called “a development of great importance”:

Today in Tripoli, the leader of Libya, Colonel Moammar al-Ghadafi, publicly confirmed his commitment to disclose and dismantle all weapons-of-mass-destruction programs in his country. He has agreed immediately and unconditionally to allow inspectors from international organizations to enter Libya.

As the president himself explained, this agreement “came about through quiet diplomacy,” specifically “nine months” of “talks” between the Libyan government and representatives of the United States and England. The commencement of the negotiations, then, was more or less simultaneous with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, exactly when Iran was making similar overtures. President Bush explicitly claimed a connection between the invasion of Iraq and the fear that, the president asserted, drove Libya to accept key concessions:

We obtained an additional United Nations Security Council Resolution requiring Saddam Hussein to prove that he had disarmed, and when that resolution was defied, we led a coalition to enforce it. All of these actions by the United States and our allies have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons do not bring influence or prestige. They bring isolation and otherwise unwelcome consequences.

The president and his supporters repeatedly cited Libya as an example of the benefits of the fear-inducing aspects of using military force. During his September 30, 2004, debate with John Kerry, President Bush again explicitly touted this connection:

I would hope to never have to use force.

But by speaking clearly and sending messages that we mean what we say, we’ve affected the world in a positive way.

Look at Libya. Libya was a threat. Libya is now peacefully dismantling its weapons programs.

Libya understood that America and others will enforce doctrine

[
sic
] and that the world is better for it.

This was precisely the dynamic that seemingly drove the Iranians to strike such a conciliatory pose with their April 2003 offer to negotiate with the United States. Parsi explained the Iranians’ motivations this way: “The U.S. victory in Iraq frightened the Iranians because U.S. forces had routed in three weeks an army that Iran had failed to defeat during a bloody eight-year war.”

Indeed, the Iranians sent the negotiation letter after the fall of Baghdad but before the beginning of any real insurgency against the American military—i.e., at the time when American power in Iraq was at its peak and before the Americans had any reason to believe that the Iranians were fueling an anti-American insurgency. Yet even with the Iranians in precisely the position of weakness and fear that Bush officials claimed they would have to be in before behavioral change would occur—and when the U.S. had its strongest hand in the Middle East—the administration categorically refused even to acknowledge the Iranian overture.

With the U.S. having conveyed to the Iranians that a cooperative framework was not even a possibility to be considered, what ensued was not difficult to predict: The Iranians had only one option, namely, to pursue a more hostile and aggressive course in order to be acknowledged, and perhaps to prepare for what seemed to be the Bush administration’s affirmative desire for escalated conflict.

When the administration rejected the 2003 Iranian request to negotiate, the Iranians’ nuclear program was close to dormant. At that time, Flynt Leverett was a senior director on the Bush National Security Council staff. He described the Iranian letter as “a serious effort, a respectable effort to lay out a comprehensive agenda for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement,” and told the
Post
’s Kessler, “At the time, the Iranians were not spinning centrifuges, they were not enriching uranium.”