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US/IRAN: Changing of the Guard Key to Talks

Omid Memarian*

BERKLEY, California, Apr 29 2008 (IPS) - A week after Senator Hillary Clinton’s harsh remarks that if hardliners in Tehran were to launch an attack on 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 programme?

A day after General David Petraeus’s briefing to Congress early this month, Pres. 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 Shiite militia in Iraq, then “America will act to protect our interests and our troops.”

However, Iran’s announcement on Apr. 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 U.S. military threats and the series of U.N. sanctions very seriously. Tehran knows that the U.S. 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 U.S.’s options?

It seems very unlikely that either the Bush administration or hardliners in Tehran would initiate serious talks prior to the U.S. 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 programme and play a more constructive role in Iraq.

The U.S.’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 possibiliyy 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 IPS, 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 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. 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 Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. The aim would be to show Khamenei that Iran’s nuclear programme is going to cost it very dearly, and that therefore it’s not worth it.

“It would be very unusual for a U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. and Iran occur, it will likely not happen before Iran’s presidential elections in late 2009 because none of the U.S. candidates want to strengthen Ahmadinejad before the polls.

When IPS asked Congressman 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.