Dialogue among foes in
Baghdad By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In the dark Middle East environment today,
the electrifying news of an upcoming summit in
Baghdad where US, Iranian and Syrian
representatives will sit around the same table
discussing Iraq's crisis is a timely and welcome
development that, to be successful, requires
judicious preparation by all parties.
On
the United States' side, this represents a delayed
implementation of the recommendations of the
bipartisan Iraq Study Group for a "diplomatic
offensive" aimed at engaging Iraq's neighbors.
Until now, the administration of President George
W
Bush
has paid lip service to those recommendations,
opting instead for a stern anti-Iran stance
combined with a tactical surge in troop presence
in Baghdad.
A victory for the US State
Department doves, pushing the arch of diplomacy,
the policy shift is explicitly endorsed by
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has told
the Senate that she will participate in a
follow-up multilateral meeting in Turkey on Iraq.
Previously, Rice had insisted that
she would sit with the "Iranians anywhere, any
time" but only if they suspended their
uranium enrichment activities first. Clearly, the entanglement
of the Iraq crisis and the nuclear crisis was
unwise, and now the US has to grapple with the
side-effects of this new development, eg, how it
can simultaneously escalate the pressures on Iran
over the nuclear row at the United Nations
Security Council.
In Iran, on the other
hand, while Ali Larijani, the head of Iran's
Supreme National Security Council, has expressed
interest in participating in the summit organized
by the Iraqi government, the final decision has
not yet been made, and Iran is keeping a watchful
eye on the White House in case there is a sudden
turnabout.
Unfortunately, signs of a
mini-reversal can be observed in the announcement
by the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, that
there will be no direct dialogue between the US
and Iranian representatives at the Baghdad summit.
Pressured by the hawkish voices as well as the
pro-Israel lobbyists, who are nowadays busy
selling the notion of an Israeli "preemptive
strike" on Iran, the Bush administration is
clearly caught in the wheel of incompatible
priorities. It takes a fine balancing act to make
the new diplomatic shift successful.
One
caveat. This author was present, as a political
observer, at the "Iraq and its neighbors" summit
in Egypt's Sharm al-Sheikh in November 2004, when
the US and Iranian diplomats met face to face, and
a golden opportunity for meaningful dialogue was
lost. The then US secretary of state, Colin
Powell, was a fan of direct dialogue with Iran
and, in retrospect, we know now that his
recommendation for engaging Iran on Iraq had been
repeatedly rebuffed by the White House.
Both Iran and the US can learn from that
particular episode, as well as earlier similar
ones, such as the first encounter between Powell
and his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, at
the UN's "6 plus 2" meeting in 2001. This author
recalls vividly the symbolic gesture of Powell
when he approached the Iranian delegates just as
he was about to get inside his limousine, shaking
foreign minister Kharrazi's hand and thanking him
for Iran's support.
An amicable though at
times reticent diplomat, Kharrazi, who is now
heading a new foreign-policy council in Iran, told
this author after the Sharm al-Sheikh meeting that
at the banquet, Powell asked him about the Bam
earthquake and offered (more) US assistance.
Roughly a year earlier, Kharrazi's cousin, Sadegh
Kharrazi, who was Iran's ambassador to the UN and,
before that, a diplomat at the UN, had initiated a
comprehensive approach for detente with the US by
dispatching a one-page fax to the US via the Swiss
Embassy. Of late this has been the subject of a
minor controversy in the US, in light of the
insistence by a former White House aide, Flynt
Leverett, that the US missed a unique opportunity
by ignoring Iran's overture.
Another
Iranian official, formerly ambassador to the UN
and currently the deputy oil minister, Hadi Nejadhosseinian, has
told this author that he saw more of
an opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough with
the US in 2000-01, but the lack of political
will in Iran precluded that. The question now,
as we are beginning to see the signs of a
back-to-the-past approach by Tehran as it
re-embraces some of the wisdom of the Mohammad
Khatami era, is whether Tehran can muster the
political will that has been perpetually absent in
view of Iran's rather fractious politics.
Lest we forget, Iran's official policy
toward Iraq has always been consistent. It is
worth recalling Kharrazi's statements at the 2004
meeting in Sharm al-Sheikh:
We firmly believe that holding free
and democratic elections within the envisaged
time frame coupled with ensuring representation
of all ethnic and religious groups is what can
ensure the realization of our common objective.
We condemn all acts of terror, kidnapping and
bombings ... indiscriminate bombardment of Iraqi
cities leading to large numbers of civilian
casualties cannot be justified in terms of
collateral damage in the war against terror and
violence.
Clearly, too high an
expectation from the coming Baghdad summit can
backfire, and in the politically charged
environment in Iran, the US and the Middle East,
all sides need to avoid the impression of
compromising their principles or basic
foreign-policy objectives, while simultaneously
pushing vigorously for a mini-breakthrough for the
sake of stabilizing Iraq and the entire region.
Indeed, the most important result of this
meeting may turn out to be in the symbolic realm,
as a timely confidence-building measure between
traditional foes and as a prelude to more tangible
results in the subsequent encounters.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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