WASHINGTON - The agreement last week
between Washington and Iran to hold direct talks
on Iraq has forged a new linkage between the Iraq
and Iran crises.
Hardliners in the
administration of President George W Bush are
resisting any such linkage, because they want to
avoid pressure for a broader settlement with Iran.
But they have already lost the battle against
talks with Iran on the stabilization of Iraq. Those
negotiations are likely to
increase the pressure for bilateral negotiations
on Iran's nuclear program and Iranian security
concerns.
The convergence of the two
issues is being driven by the need of the United
States and the Iraqi political factions for
Iranian help in resolving the sectarian violence
and political deadlock in Iraq, and by Iran's
desire to reach a broader settlement with
Washington.
The US reactions to the
Iranian acceptance of talks on Iraq reveal a sharp
contrast in the attitudes of Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and other administration
officials toward the talks.
Before flying
to Australia last week, Rice said the talks with
Iran on Iraq "could be useful". The following day,
however, some administration officials began to
denigrate the value of those talks. White House
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said they
were "simply a device by the Iranians to try to
divert pressure that they are feeling in New
York".
Hadley suggested that there was no
need for the US to talk with Iran at all, because
"we're talking to Iran all the time: we make
statements, they make statements".
The
same day, a "senior US official", speaking to
reporters while demanding anonymity, called the
Iranian offer of talks "a stunt" and said
Washington would participate only to avoid
"criticisms that it did not do all it can do to
defuse bloody tensions in Iraq". And a White House
official sought out reporters to say the Iranian
offer was "almost puffery".
The attacks by
those associated with the administration's
hardline policy toward Iran revealed sharp
differences over which was more important -
isolating Iran diplomatically, or taking advantage
of its influence within the Shi'ite political
leadership in Iraq to help settle the crisis
there.
The group of Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
whose views were expressed by Hadley and the
anonymous officials minimizing the importance of
talks with Iran, clearly cares less about what
happens in Iraq than they do about maintaining the
policy of implicit, if not explicit, regime change
in Tehran.
Rice and US Ambassador to Iraq
Zalmay Khalilzad, however, are apparently willing
to risk a weakening or breach of the policy of
isolating and threatening Iran, because they
recognize the desperation of the
sectarian-political situation in Iraq and believe
Iran could help.
Since late last year,
Bush has sided with Rice and Khalilzad against
Cheney and Rumsfeld, when they prevailed on Bush
to authorize talks with Iran on the Iraq crisis.
In late December or early January, Khalilzad
dispatched a message to Iranian authorities
proposing cooperation on Iraq, according to the
London-based Arab-language newspaper Al-Hayat.
The Cheney-Rumsfeld group did not attack
the decision then, because they were confident
that Iran would reject an invitation for
discussions limited solely to Iraq. Iran's foreign
minister quickly confirmed that belief by
declaring that Iran would not agree to those
terms.
Khalilzad has apparently repeated
his proposal to Iran to discuss the stabilization
of Iraq more recently. According to a March 12
article in the London Sunday Times by Lindsey
Hilsum, the international editor of London's
Channel 4 news, a senior Iranian intelligence
official said that the US invitation of talks on
Iraq had been "renewed" in late February.
This time, the Iranians did not reject the
US proposal. Their willingness to help stabilize
the situation in Iraq without any commitment to
broader talks reflects the increased perception in
Tehran of a danger of military confrontation with
Washington.
Since the Iranian rejection of
Khalilzad's earlier proposal for talks, the Bush
administration has stepped up its pressure on
Tehran over the nuclear issue and orchestrated a
campaign to take that issue to the United Nations
Security Council, where it now sits awaiting a
council resolution.
In agreeing to help
the US on Iraq, the Iranians are primarily
interested in the possibility of using talks on
Iraq as a bridge to broader diplomatic
negotiations with Washington. The Iranian
intelligence official told Hilsum that Tehran
would accept the US offer for talks, but wanted
them to be in a neutral country, hoping they would
eventually lead to a dialogue on the nuclear issue
as well.
In announcing Tehran's acceptance
of US terms for the talks, Ali Larijani, Iran's
chief negotiator on its nuclear program, who is
known to be close to the supreme leader of the
regime, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini, hinted at
the desire to reach an accommodation with
Washington on nuclear and other issues.
"If the Americans stop their troublemaking
in the region and if they examine their previous
conduct and behavior, a lot of things may happen,"
he said.
The hardliners in Washington are
determined to avoid just such negotiations on
Iran's nuclear program. No sooner had the Iranian
agreement to discuss Iraq been made public last
Thursday than Under Secretary of State Nicholas
Burns publicly ruled out any discussions with Iran
on the nuclear issue.
He asserted that any
such negotiations would be "futile in view of the
country's track record on the issue". But he also
revealed that rejecting negotiations on Iran's
nuclear enrichment program was part of the
administration's strategy of putting pressure on
Iran, referring to its "calculation that it is
better to isolate the Iranian regime".
Although the US administration seeks to
keep cooperation with Iran over the crisis in Iraq
separate from its strategy of isolation of Iran,
the evolution of the Iraq crisis may make such
separation impossible. The discussions on Iraq
will have to involve various political formulas
that the US and Iran could both support. Iran
would be asked to help sell the militant Shi'ite
parties on a settlement plan with unpalatable
compromises for those same parties.
If the
Iranians become more deeply involved in the
internal negotiation in Iraq, and the usefulness
of their role becomes widely recognized, it will
certainly be more difficult for the US to resist
political-diplomatic pressures to talk with Tehran
about the larger issues threatening the peace of
the region - Iran's nuclear program and the US
efforts to isolate and destabilize the regime.
Ironically, Iran's assistance in brokering
a Shi'ite-Sunni political compromise has been
sought by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, the largest party in the dominant Shi'ite
alliance.
Sunni political leaders,
meanwhile, have rejected the idea of US-Iranian
talks on a settlement, despite the fact that
Iranian support is necessary to get the Shi'ites
to agree on key Sunni demands.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and
the Road to War in Vietnam, was published last
June.
