WASHINGTON - While his handlers worked
assiduously on Tuesday to ensure that US President
George W Bush did not run into his Iranian
nemesis, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, in the corridors of
the United Nations, a legendary fixer for the Bush
family announced that the White House had cleared
him to meet with a "high representative" of
Tehran's government.
Former secretary of
state James Baker, who co-chairs a bipartisan,
congressionally appointed task force called the
Iraq
Study Group (ISG), said
that the timing of the meeting with that
representative, whom he declined to name, had yet
to be arranged, but that permission for such a
meeting to take place had been granted.
"I'm fairly confident that we will meet
with a high representative of the [Iranian]
government," he said at a press conference at the
US Institute of Peace, one of several think-tanks,
including the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the Center for the Study of
the Presidency, and Baker's own Houston-based
Institute for Public Policy, that support the
ISG's work.
Such a meeting would no doubt
feed speculation that Baker, a consummate
"realist" who reportedly has been privately
critical of the Bush administration's Middle East
policies, could help tilt the balance of power
within the administration in favor of fellow
realists, centered in the State Department.
They generally support greater flexibility
in dealing with perceived US foes in the region,
and against right-wing hawks led by Vice President
Dick Cheney who have steadfastly opposed
engagement with both Iran and Syria.
Indeed, Baker also announced on Tuesday
that his task force would meet this week with the
foreign minister of Syria, against which the Bush
administration has mounted a diplomatic boycott
for almost two years. The task force has already
met with Damascus' ambassador in Washington, as
part of a series of meetings with Washington-based
envoys from Iraq's Arab neighbors.
The ISG
was launched by Congress and quietly endorsed by
the White House in April at the suggestion of a
senior Republican lawmaker, Frank Wolf, who
expressed growing concern about both the
increasingly obvious deterioration of the
situation in Iraq - and the threats it posed to
the larger region - and the increasingly rancorous
and partisan tone of the domestic debate about the
war.
Baker, who served as Washington's
chief diplomat under president George H W Bush,
agreed to the appointment after gaining the
personal approval of the younger Bush himself.
The ISG is co-chaired by former Democratic
congressman Lee Hamilton, who also serves as the
head of the Wilson International Center for
Scholars in Washington, and consists of eight
other members divided equally among prominent
Republicans and Democrats, including several
former senior members of the Ronald Reagan, elder
Bush and Bill Clinton administrations.
Aiding the task force, which spent four
days in Iraq this month, are some five dozen
policy experts and Middle East specialists from
think-tanks, academic institutions and the private
sector. They range from neo-conservative hawks,
such as Clifford May of the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies, to outspoken foes of the
original decision to invade Iraq, such as the
president of the Middle East Policy Council,
retired ambassador Charles Freeman. They in turn
are divided into four working groups: economy and
reconstruction; military and security; political
development; and strategic environment.
All participants have been ordered
repeatedly by Baker not to talk to the press or
anyone else about the ISG's deliberations until
its work is concluded, probably early next year,
so as not to influence the mid-term congressional
elections in November. Hamilton said the group's
final report and recommendations would be made
public immediately after they were submitted to
Congress and the president.
In their
remarks on Tuesday, the ISG's first public
appearance since its formation, both Baker and
Hamilton stressed that the group had not yet begun
discussing those recommendations. Hamilton,
however, also stressed the urgency and the Iraqi
government's responsibility for reversing negative
trends.
"No one can expect miracles, but
the people of Iraq have the right to expect
immediate action," he said, adding: "The next
three months are critical."
Unlike the
elder Bush's other top "realist" foreign-policy
aide, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft,
with whom he remains close, Baker has been
discreet about his criticism of the younger Bush's
Middle East policies.
"He has never
overtly criticized Bush," noted Steve Clemons,
director of the American Strategy Project at the
New America Foundation. Unlike Scowcroft, "he has
essentially kept a foothold in the
administration".
Indeed, Baker, who led a
major diplomatic effort for Bush in 2004 to reduce
Iraq's staggering foreign debt, has confined his
public criticism to the way the Pentagon handled
the Iraq invasion and its aftermath.
Nonetheless, Baker, whose law firm has
long represented some of the United States'
biggest oil companies, is widely believed to agree
with Scowcroft's criticisms of Bush's virtually
unconditional alignment with Israel and his
refusal to engage Iran and Syria, not only with
respect to stabilizing Iraq - the ISG's focus -
but also on a variety of other regional issues.
"He's always been a proponent of
dialogue," said Trita Parsi, an Iran expert and
author of Treacherous Triangle: The Secret
Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United
States, who suggested that the Baker talks may
offer an opportunity for "informal talks" with
Iran and, in any event, "should help reduce the
negative trend and the loss of trust" between
Tehran and Washington. "I think the fact that the
talks will take place is quite significant in and
of itself," he said.
Indeed, during the
recent month-long conflict between Israel and
Hezbollah, the director of the Baker Institute,
Edward Djerejian, who also served as an ambassador
to Damascus and as Baker's top Middle East adviser
in the State Department during the 1991 Gulf War,
called explicitly for the Bush administration to
engage in direct talks with both Syria and Iran on
a range of issues.
"Despite the tragedy we
see unfolding in the region on all sides, this
crisis does represent an opportunity to get on
with the real core issues in the region, and this
will require contacting and dealing with all the
players. All the players," Djerejian, who has
advised Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
mentored her public-diplomacy chief and longtime
Bush adviser, Karen Hughes, told an interviewer on
National Public Radio early last month.
Rice, who has tried with limited success
to move US policy in a more flexible direction,
particularly with respect to Iran, has reportedly
come largely to share that view, but has been
thwarted by Cheney and other senior officials,
including Elliot Abrams, the neo-conservative
director of Middle East affairs in the National
Security Council, in implementing it.
Whether Baker, in his work on the ISG or
alongside, might help establish the kind of
dialogue publicly advocated by Djerejian is
speculative at this point. Many observers believe
that, at the very least, a strong recommendation
by him or the group as a whole that Washington
directly engage Tehran would be difficult for the
administration to resist, particularly if current
trends are not reversed.
"It seems to me
that Rice has gotten the latitude from Bush to
pursue this sort of alternative course with Iran
and the broader Middle East," Clemons said,
adding: "But it doesn't mean that the president
has bought into the process."
Ten months
ago, the Bush administration in fact agreed to a
suggestion by its ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay
Khalilzad, to initiate talks with Tehran about
stabilizing Iraq, but Washington subsequently
backed away from the idea.
