Washington gets 'neighborly' over
Iraq By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Two weeks after making major
concessions for a nuclear accord with North Korea,
the administration of US President George W Bush
said on Tuesday that it is prepared to sit down
with Iran and Syria as part of a regional
conference to stabilize Iraq.
In testimony
before the Senate Appropriations Committee,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, widely
considered the leader of the "realist" faction
within the administration, announced
that
Washington will join a "neighbors' meeting",
convened by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
and scheduled for the first half of March, to be
followed by ministerial talks one month later that
she will attend.
"I would note that the
Iraqi government has invited all of its neighbors,
including Syria and Iran, to attend both of these
regional meetings," she said. "We hope that all
governments will seize this opportunity to improve
[their] relations with Iraq and to work for peace
and stability in the region."
She also
described the proposed regional talks that would
explicitly embrace Iran and Syria as consistent
with a key recommendation last December of the
Iraq Study Group (ISG), a bipartisan task force
co-chaired by former secretary of state James
Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee
Hamilton, which had previously been all but
rejected by Bush.
"This is one of the key
findings, of course, of the ISG, and it is an
important dimension that many in the Senate and in
the Congress have brought to our attention, and
I've had very fruitful discussions about how to do
this," said Rice, who referred to the Iraqi
initiative as a "new diplomatic offensive", a
phrase lifted directly from the report.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormick
later stressed that the proposed talks would be
confined to Iraqi security, reconstruction and
national reconciliation, although he did not rule
out bilateral talks on other issues. At the same
time, he insisted that direct talks with Iran on
its nuclear program remained conditional on Tehran
suspending its uranium enrichment.
But
both sets of talks, according to Rice, will also
include members of the United Nations Security
Council's Permanent Five (P5), which are currently
engaged in discussions over possible sanctions
against Tehran for rejecting their demand that
enrichment be suspended, and possibly members of
the Group of Eight. That would set up at least the
theoretical possibility of Rice and her
counterparts from Russia, China, Britain, France
(the P5 members along with the US) and Germany -
all of which have long urged Washington to sit
down with Iran - holding informal discussions on
nuclear issues with Tehran's representatives in
April.
Tuesday's statements came amid
growing public and congressional concern about the
administration's intentions toward Iran,
particularly in light of its recent deployment of
two aircraft-carrier groups to the Persian Gulf
and charges by Bush and other senior officials
that Tehran is secretly providing deadly explosive
devices to its allies in Iraq that have allegedly
killed some 170 US soldiers there since 2004.
A number of analysts, including some
retired military and intelligence officers, have
told reporters they think the administration may
be trying to provoke an incident that would
provide a pretext for Washington to launch attacks
on Iran's suspected nuclear sites and other
targets as a way of both setting back Tehran's
nuclear program and limiting its ability to
retaliate against the US or its regional allies.
Such speculation has been vigorously
denied by senior officials, particularly Defense
Secretary Robert Gates and the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, even
while Vice President Dick Cheney and other hawks
have continued to insist that "all options are on
the table" in dealing with Tehran's nuclear
program or its alleged support for anti-US Shiite
militias in Iraq.
At the same time,
Democrats - including leading presidential
candidates such as Senators Hillary Clinton,
Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden - as well as some
influential Republicans such as Senators John
Warner and Chuck Hagel have been pressing hard on
the administration to embrace the ISG
recommendation for direct talks with Iran and
Syria to help stabilize Iraq and thus permit
Washington to begin extracting its troops from
what most analysts and an ever-larger majority of
the public has come to see as a quagmire.
Any diplomatic engagement with Iran,
however, has been strongly opposed by
administration hawks, particularly in Cheney's
office and the National Security Council, as well
as their mainly neo-conservative supporters
outside the government who led a carefully
orchestrated effort to discredit the ISG even
before it released its recommendations in early
December.
But the hawks suffered a major
defeat over the past month when, at Rice's behest,
Bush authorized direct bilateral talks between the
US and North Korea for the first time and then
signed off on a multilateral accord whereby
Pyongyang agreed to shut down its main nuclear
facility and permit the return of inspectors from
the International Atomic Energy Agency in exchange
for economic aid, the lifting of some financial
sanctions, and the launch of a process that, if
completed, would lead to US diplomatic recognition
- in effect giving up on the "regime change"
strategy urged by the hawks.
They have
since complained that Rice short-circuited the
normal policymaking process by going directly to
Bush to gain approval of the North Korea
initiative without any major inter-agency review
that would have given them an opportunity to
modify or shoot down the deal.
The
question now is whether Rice's ostentatious
endorsement of the ISG's call for engaging Iran -
even if it is nominally at the Iraqi government's
initiative and within the narrow framework of
Iraq's security - marks a similar strategic shift
that could reverse the recent trajectory toward
confrontation with Tehran, or whether it
represents a mere tactical maneuver designed to
soothe an increasingly anxious Congress and
preempt any move on its part to rein in the
administration.
On this question, some
critics were cautiously optimistic on Tuesday,
with Hagel calling the proposed meetings "an
important first step" and Biden expressing the
hope that "clearer heads in the administration are
beginning to prevail".
More skeptically,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid also described
the announcement as "a first step, but not enough
on its own. Our national security requires a
robust diplomatic effort in the Middle East, and
the Bush administration cannot again settle for
mere half-measures," he said.
Noting
recent changes in key policymaking positions that
have favored "realists" over administration hawks,
as well as strong indications that the military
brass are "very, very, very opposed to picking a
fight with Iran", one observer of US policy
suggested that Tuesday's statements could indeed
signal a strategic shift.
"Since Bush has
shown the ability to change his mind, if not his
heart, on North Korea," Chris Nelson, publisher
and editor of the insider newsletter The Nelson
Report, noted on Tuesday night, "one must ask if
Rice's announcement shows that the president
realizes that if he has a chance to resolve Iraq,
it cannot come while pursuing a crisis with Iran.
One crisis at a time, in other words."
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