WASHINGTON - Just as the theocratic
leadership in Iran is trying to rein in the
aggressive nationalism of the new president,
Mahmud Ahmadinejad, so Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice appears to be restraining
aggressive nationalists in Washington who want to
escalate rising tensions with Iran and Syria.
In just the past 10 days, Rice and her
State Department have reportedly not only opposed
proposals to carry out military raids inside Syria
as a way of further weakening, and possibly
overthrowing, its already-beleaguered President
Bashar Assad, but they have also put forward a
plan for directly engaging Iran for the first time
since May 2003.
The latter move, which
according to the Wall Street Journal also
includes setting up a small
"interests section" in Teheran, came even as
British Prime Minister Tony Blair suggested that
Iran was behind a series of bombings by Shi'ite
militia in southern Iraq that killed half a dozen
British soldiers this year. Bush himself was also
preparing to deliver a speech in which he called
both Iran and Syria "allies of convenience" of
al-Qaeda and "Islamic radicalism". In both
cases, the role played by Rice has aggravated
rightwing hawks, particularly hardline
neo-conservatives who were already unhappy about
her public declarations that Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon must do more for
Palestinians beyond disengagement from Gaza. It
suggests that her so-called "practical idealism"
may not be all that different from the "realism"
of her immediate predecessor, the hapless Colin
Powell.
It may also bear some similarity
to realist tendencies of Iran's supreme religious
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who last week
enhanced the authority of his Expediency Council
and its chairman, (the former president) Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, to oversee the performance of
Ahmadinejad's government, particularly in foreign
policy.
The approval last month of a
resolution referring Iran to the UN Security
Council for allegedly violating its
nuclear-reporting obligations was reportedly seen
- by Teheran's stock market as well as its grey
beards - as a sharp setback to its international
standing, one that had to be taken seriously given
rising tensions with Washington over Iran's
nuclear program and its activities in Iraq.
"Managers at [the nuclear] sector should
know that we need diplomacy and not slogans," said
Rafsanjani, who was defeated by Ahmadinejad in
June's elections. "This [is] where we should use
all our leverages with patience and wisdom,
without provocation and slogans that can give
pretexts to the enemies."
His remarks
sounded eerily like Rice's mantra since becoming
secretary of state, "Now is the time for
diplomacy."
In contrast to Powell, who
labored long and hard to achieve the same end,
Rice has so far succeeded in getting Bush to try
serious diplomacy, as well as rhetorical posturing
and military threats, on the two remaining members
of the "axis of evil", Iran and North Korea.
On the first, she persuaded her boss to
support the negotiating position of Britain,
France and Germany (the EU-3) on a deal to provide
Tehran with economic and other carrots in exchange
for renouncing its production of fissionable
material that could be used to build nuclear
weapons.
On the second, her chief
negotiator in the six-party talks for
de-nuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, Assistant
Secretary for Asian Affairs Christopher Hill, was
given significantly greater flexibility to engage
the North Koreans directly in discussions than
Powell was ever able to get.
These
victories have tended to confirm the assessment
that Rice and her team - which features such
formidable players as Deputy Secretary Robert
Zoellick, Under Secretary for Political Affairs
Nicholas Burns and the State Department counselor,
Philip Zelikow - are in a much stronger position
in the administration vis-a-vis the hawks.
Just last week, a prominent
neo-conservative, Danielle Pletka of the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), complained that the
"the Bush revolution has ... lost its energy" and
that the administration's "rhetoric retains its
ring, but it does not resonate through the
Department of State".
The realists'
stronger position, of course, is due above all to
the fact that, with 150,000 US troops still bogged
down in Iraq at the cost of US$6 billion a month,
the "coalition of the willing" getting smaller
virtually every month and public support for the
war in a state of collapse, those who argue for
expanding the conflict have a hard row to hoe.
It also helps that key Pentagon ideologues
- notably the former deputy secretary, Paul
Wolfowitz, and the former under secretary for
policy, Douglas Feith - are gone, and that
relations between Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and influential neo-conservatives, such
as Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, have
deteriorated badly.
In addition, National
Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has weighed in
with Rice in most internal battles, in contrast to
Rice's reluctance to take positions when she
served in the post in Bush's first term. Finally,
Rice has also benefited from a much closer
personal relationship with the president than
Powell could even dream about.
But that
does not mean that the hawks are defeated. On both
Syria and Iran, as demonstrated by the threatening
tone of Bush's speech last week, the hawks,
particularly neo-conservatives, are pressing for
stronger action.
For several months,
Kristol, among others, has been urging
cross-border raids - either by air or by land - on
Syrian targets, particularly sites where "foreign
fighters" bound for Iraq allegedly train or
muster.
According to Knight-Ridder
newspapers, that proposal was discussed among
Bush's top advisers late last month, but it was
Rice, who has fiercely criticized Damascus in
public, who successfully argued against the idea,
particularly given the anticipated October 25
report by a UN commission investigating the
assassination of the former Lebanese prime
minister, Rafik Hariri. If it inculpates Assad,
the regime could fall on its own. In that sense,
Rice's advice was, if nothing else, "expedient".
On Iran, the administration's rhetoric has
also hardened amid charges, which preceded
Blair's, that Iran was providing both its Shi'ite
allies and Sunni insurgents with specially
designed bombs. On this front, too, the
neo-conservatives, who remain powerful in Vice
President Dick Cheney's office and elsewhere in
the national-security bureaucracy, including the
State Department's non-proliferation bureau and
the US mission at the UN, have been the most
outspoken, with the AEI in the vanguard role.
On Monday, for example, one of its
resident regional specialists, Michael Rubin,
published an article entitled "Only Threat of
Force Will Tame Tehran" in the London Guardian.
Later this month, AEI will host a conference
focusing on Iranian minorities, such as
Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Ahwazis and Balochis who, "in
the event the current regime falls ... will
undoubtedly play an important role in their
country's future".
In this context, Rice's
apparent backing for engaging Tehran as part of a
new carrot-and-stick strategy that would include
"a quiet approach to representatives of Khameini"
himself, according to the Wall Street Journal, is
no less remarkable than her successful efforts to
gain a broader negotiating mandate for North
Korea.
