Iran-US talks await new leadership
era By Omid Memarian
BERKLEY, California - A week after
Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton's harsh remarks
that if hardliners in Tehran were to attack
Israel, it would result in the "total
obliteration" of Iran, a Republican member of the
House Select Committee on Intelligence, Peter
Hoekstra, suggested on CNN that "engaging in a
full-court diplomatic press with Iran is a good
thing to begin the process" of reaching out to
Tehran.
The hawkish tone of Clinton and
the more moderate view of Hoekstra about dealing
with Iran's so-called threat leaves a major
question unanswered: What can and should the
United States do about Iran's alleged influence in
Iraq and its nuclear program?
A day after
General David Petraeus' briefing to Congress this
month, President George W
Bush called Iran one of the two "greatest threats
to America in this century" - along with al-Qaeda.
Bush also warned Iran that if it did not stop
arming and training Shi'ite militia in Iraq, then
"America will act to protect our interests and our
troops".
And Bush this week said he
released intelligence about suspected North
Korea-Syria nuclear collusion to put pressure on
Pyongyang and send a message to Iran that it could
not hide its own nuclear program.
Also
this week, the US ambassador to the United
Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security
Council that Iran was behind recent clashes in the
southern Iraqi city of Basra and in Baghdad,
saying Tehran was training and supplying weapons
to militias.
"The recent clashes between
criminal militia elements and Iraqi government
forces in Basra and Baghdad have highlighted
Iran's destabilizing influence and actions," he
said.
However, Iran's announcement on
April 8 that it is starting construction of 6,000
centrifuges for uranium enrichment at the
underground complex of Natanz shows that it does
not take US military threats and the series of UN
sanctions very seriously. Tehran knows that the US
is suffering in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more
importantly, the idea of yet another war is very
unpopular during a presidential campaign season.
Meanwhile, high oil prices have kept Iran's
economy afloat.
If the adoption of
sanctions and the threat of a military attack do
not work, then what are the US's options?
It seems very unlikely that either the
Bush administration or hardliners in Tehran will
initiate serious talks prior to the US
presidential elections in November. But the
prospect of dealing with Iran in a more effective
way seems plausible after the elections,
particularly because of the three presidential
frontrunners' stances on this issue.
Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain have
suggested a variety of options, ranging from
direct and unconditional talks with Iranian
leaders, to pursing the carrot and stick strategy,
meaning using military threats and financial
pressure on one side and negotiations on the
other. This was the strategy that the current
administration more or less pursued, particularly
during the past two years. It hoped to put more
pressure on Tehran's hardliner government to stop
its nuclear program and play a more constructive
role in Iraq.
The US's options could even
include a new review of Iran's 2003 "grand
bargain" proposal, which was at the time rejected
by Washington.
"A democratic
administration would go back and try to open that
possibility up for discussions of a grand bargain
of one sort or another ... Democrats would
certainly have seen that as a missed opportunity,"
Congressman Henry Waxman, chair of the House
Oversight Committee, told Inter Press Service,
adding that military option would always be on the
table.
During the past two years,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered to
hold direct talks with the Iranian government on
the condition that they halt their uranium
enrichment programme. Tehran rejected any
precondition to avoid losing face with the Iranian
people. But depending on the new situation, these
preconditions could conceivably be removed from
the table.
It would not be unprecedented.
When former president Richard Nixon went to China,
there was no precondition about what would come
out of the meeting - just that he was going to
talk to Mao Zedong. Many pundits believe that if
Nixon could do this with China, and then Obama,
Clinton and even McCain could do it with Iran.
Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a
think-tank established by the powerful American
Israel Public Affairs Committee, thinks that
Washington's objective is to bring to bear a
variety of pressures - financial, trade, security,
political and military - on Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. The aim would be
to show Khamenei that Iran's nuclear program is
going to cost it very dearly, and that therefore
it's not worth it.
"It would be very
unusual for a US president to rule out any
particular policy option," Clawson told IPS in his
office in Washington. He believes that "there's a
strong feeling on the part of the foreign policy
establishment of this country that the threat of
military force helps diplomacy, and that diplomacy
is a combination of sticks and carrots."
"Before some great breakthrough, there
will be quiet discussions that take place about
the parameters of the deal," he told IPS.
"Those quiet discussions will not take
place between the Swiss ambassador and an Iranian
deputy foreign minister who's been fired from his
job a few months before for unauthorized contact,
unauthorized proposals to Americans," Clawson
added, mocking the way the Iranians delivered
their "grand bargain" proposal in 2003.
He
said such conversations should be initiated
through intelligence channels. "The CIA has every
authority to talk to people from MOIS [Iran's
intelligence service], and I assume MOIS has every
authority to talk to people from the CIA ...
That's the tradition."
Suzanne Maloney, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a
former US State Department policy advisor,
believes that over the past two years the Bush
administration has been trying to find a way to
have a dialogue with Iran.
"There was a
lot of resistance over the first five years or so
to having any direct dialogue over the nuclear
issue, but that really changed in a substantial
way. Unfortunately, efforts to start the dialogue
in May 2006 with the offer to negotiate were very
much undermined by past history of talk about
regime change and continuing talk of bellicose
rhetoric," she said.
However, should any
kind of talks between the US and Iran occur, it
will likely not happen before Iran's presidential
elections in late 2009 because none of the US
candidates want to strengthen Ahmadinejad before
the polls.
When IPS asked Waxman whether
he could imagine one day displaying a photograph
of an Iranian leader on the wall of his office,
next to the pictures of other Middle Eastern
leaders, he said that he wouldn't rule it out. "I
hope someday we can have open contact with Iran,
but I would hope at that point Ahmadinejad would
not be president," he said.
Omid Memarian is World
Peace Fellow at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of
Journalism. He is the recipient of Human Rights
Watch's Human Rights Defender award and a regular
contributor to IPS.
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