WASHINGTON -
A new round in the ongoing battle between realists and
neo-conservative and other hawks over Iran policy began
this week as a task force of the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR) published a report urging Washington to
engage Tehran on a selected range of issues of mutual
concern.
The task force, co-chaired by Zbigniew
Brzezinski, national security adviser under former
president Jimmy Carter (1977-81), and including Robert
Gates, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
under past president George H W Bush (1989-93), argues
that neo-conservative and other analysts who are urging
that Washington pursue "regime change" in Iran
underestimate the staying power of the current
government there.
"Despite considerable
political flux and popular dissatisfaction," the 79-page
report said, "Iran is not on the verge of another
revolution. Those forces that are committed to
preserving Iran's current system remain firmly in
control."
The report, "Iran: Time for a New
Approach", also argues that Washington's invasion of
Iraq, as well as Iran's rapid progress in developing
possible nuclear-weapons capability, makes it more
urgent than ever to resume and broaden bilateral talks
that broke off 14 months ago.
But it stresses
that a "grand bargain" to settle all outstanding
conflicts between Washington and Tehran is unrealistic
and that talks should focus instead on making
"incremental progress" on a variety of key issues,
including regional stability and Iran's nuclear
ambitions.
The 21 task-force members also
stressed that Washington should offer fewer sticks and
more carrots than in the past, suggesting, "The prospect
of [Iran opening] commercial relations with the United
States could be a powerful tool in Washington's
arsenal."
The report's recommendations are
considered anathema to the neo-conservative hawks
closely associated with Vice President Dick Cheney and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who led the drive to
war in Iraq.
Indeed, its release was met with a
furious attack by Michael Ledeen, a fellow at the
American Enterprise Institute, who is particularly close
to both former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard
Perle and Defense Under Secretary for Policy Douglas
Feith, and who has long asserted that Iran is ripe for
revolution by "democratic" forces that deserve US
support.
Ledeen, who considers Tehran the global
capital of Islamist "terror masters", wrote in National
Review Online that the CFR recommendations were
"humiliating" and constituted "appeasement".
They were made worse, he added, in light of
leaks last weekend that the soon-to-be-released final
report of the bipartisan commission investigating the
September 11, 2001, attacks will assert that Iran
provided members of al-Qaeda, including some of the
hijackers, safe passage during the year before the
attacks.
The issue comes at a particularly
sensitive moment in the evolution of US-Iranian
relations, which were formally broken off 25 years ago
after militants captured the US Embassy in Tehran and
held its diplomats hostage.
As noted in the
report, the United States currently has about 160,000
troops - 20,000 in Afghanistan and 140,000 in Iraq -
deployed just across the borders with Iran, named by
President George W Bush in 2002 as a charter member of
the "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea.
Reports over the past month that Israel may be
planning a military strike against Iranian nuclear
facilities have added to existing tensions, particularly
due to uncertainties regarding Tehran's dialogues over
its nuclear program with the United Kingdom, France,
Germany and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
These new factors have intensified the
three-and-a-half-year-old struggle within the Bush
administration between the hawks, particularly the
neo-conservatives for whom the security of Israel is a
core commitment, and the realists, who are led by
Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Powell, in
turn, is backed by a number of top alumni of past
Republican and Democratic administrations, including
Bush Sr's former national security adviser, Brent
Scowcroft, Brzezinski, and Frank Carlucci, who served as
national security adviser and defense secretary for the
late president Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and also
participated in the task force.
While the hawks
dominated Middle East policy from September 11 through
the Iraq invasion, their star faded as that adventure
came increasingly to resemble a quagmire, so that the
realists appear to have gained the upper hand at the
moment, at least as concerns Iraq.
The realists
have also been strengthened by the perception that US
forces in the region, which seemed irresistible in the
wake of the Afghan and Iraq campaigns, are now seen as
much more vulnerable and thus less of a military threat
to Iran than 14 months ago. "Military action [is now]
highly unlikely to be attempted and, if attempted, to be
successful," Gates said on Monday.
But if the
internal balance of power on Iraq favors the realists,
the situation regarding Iran is less clear. While few
analysts believe Washington would launch a military
strike on Tehran before the November elections,
speculation that a second Bush term would make "regime
change" in Iran a top priority has been persistent.
And forces in Congress that back Israel's
governing Likud Party are already moving to endorse
legislation that would officially endorse such a goal as
official US policy.
It is in this context that
the task force, whose membership was convened by CFR's
new president and former top Powell aide, Richard Haass,
is calling for selective engagement with Tehran. "The
realistic alternative," according to Gates, "is US
isolation and impotence."
The critical message
is that neo-conservative claims that the Islamic
Republic is on its last legs represent wishful thinking.
Given Iran's ability to make trouble for Washington in
both Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as advances made in
its nuclear program, the current situation "mandates the
United States to deal with the current regime rather
than wait for it to fall", argues the report, which
recommends five specific steps.
First, the
administration should offer Tehran a "direct dialogue on
specific issues of regional stabilization", much as it
did for 18 months between the US campaign in Afghanistan
and May 2003, when Washington accused Iran of harboring
leaders of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda responsible for
attacks in Saudi Arabia.
Second, Washington
should press to clarify the status of al-Qaeda
operatives detained by Tehran, in exchange for ensuring
that the Iraq-based Iranian rebel group
Mujahedin-e-Khalq is disbanded and its leaders brought
to justice for terrorist acts. Any security dialogue,
however, must be conditioned on assurances that Tehran
is not providing support to groups violently opposed to
the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Third,
the US should work closely with Europe and Russia to
ensure that Iran follows through on its commitment that
it is not developing nuclear weapons by getting it to
extend its freeze on all enrichment-related and
reprocessing activities to a permanent ban and take
other steps to guarantee compliance. In exchange,
Washington should remove its objections to an Iranian
civil nuclear program.
Fourth, Washington should
resume an active role in negotiating peace between
Israel and the Palestinians, which the report says is
"central to eventually stemming the tide of extremism in
the region".
Finally, the administration should
promote people-to-people and commercial exchanges
between Iran and the wider world, including authorizing
US non-governmental organizations to operate in Iran,
and agreeing to Iran's application to begin accession
talks with the World Trade Organization.
Both
Gates and Brzezinski said the administration should also
use its influence to prevent a possible Israeli military
strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, which,
according to Brzezinski, would have "extremely adverse
consequences" both for proponents of change in Iran and
for the US position in Iraq and Afghanistan, where
Tehran could be expected to retaliate.
It would
be impossible for Israeli warplanes to reach their
targets without flying in air space controlled by the US
military, pointed out Brzezinski.
What to do
over Iran Meanwhile, Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty (RFE/RL) reports that Bush says he hopes to get
to the bottom of the report on Iran and September 11,
with the help of John McLaughlin, the acting head of the
CIA.
Bush said: "Of course we want to know all
the facts. Acting director McLaughlin said there was no
direct connection between Iran and the attacks of
September 11. We will continue to look and see if the
Iranians were involved. I have long expressed my
concerns about Iran - after all, it's a totalitarian
society."
Bush's statement was one of his
toughest remarks on Iran in recent months. But State
Department spokesman Richard Boucher has said the US is
"willing to sit down" and talk with the Iranians "if the
president determines it's in our interest to do so and
we think there's the opportunity for progress".
McLaughlin, speaking to a television news
program on Sunday, said the government "has no evidence"
of an official connection between Tehran and September
11.
But no matter what US intelligence agencies
learn, there may be little the US can do - or even might
want to do - to punish Iran.
Marina Ottaway, a
specialist in Middle Eastern and African issues at the
Washington-based think-tank Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, told RFE/RL that the commission's
report, if accurate, is only the latest of several
reasons that invading Iraq was a mistake. Now, Ottaway
said, Bush's emphasis on military action in its foreign
policy has left it little room to take meaningful action
against Iran.
"There is not a lot that the US
can do on Iran right now," Ottaway said, adding that the
US "certainly does not have a military option the way
things are, and it needs some cooperation from Iran on
Iraq. Iran certainly has the capacity to make things in
Iraq much more difficult for the United States. At the
same time, the United States does not have the option of
doing in Iran what it did in Iraq, and that is changing
the regime."
Ottaway said a policy of regime
change can succeed only if the US has enough military
might. But given the resources that the Bush
administration already has devoted to Iraq and
Afghanistan, she said, it has left itself with few
military options elsewhere. "By going to war in Iraq,
the US narrowed its options toward Iran and toward North
Korea," Ottaway said. "In other words, there are only so
many wars the US can fight at one time."
Another
analyst, Nathan Brown, said he finds it unlikely that
Iran and al-Qaeda would have any significant contacts.
Brown, a professor of international political science at
George Washington University in Washington, cited the
deeply conflicting religious principles held by the
Iranian government on one side and al-Qaeda on the
other.
"Any strong connection [between Iran and
al-Qaeda] would be implausible," Brown said. "The
environment which bin Laden comes out of is one which
regards Shi'ite Muslims as not simply mistaken but as
apostate. But it also strikes me as not impossible, but
quite strange and maybe implausible, that the Iranians
would even approach them, because there's bad blood that
goes back a couple of hundred years - there's very deep
bad blood."
Brown said there appears to be no
evidence that Iran actually had a role in the September
11 attacks, and for that reason alone he does not expect
a strong response from the US.
"The conclusions
[of the independent 9-11 Commission] might be leaked,
but the evidence we may never know," Brown said. "So,
unless we've got hard evidence, it doesn't seem to me to
be wise to make too much out of it. And also, it's my
reading of the political situation: That's what's likely
going to happen. Right now just does not seem to be the
time for an American-Iranian confrontation."
