Republican-Iranian connections
renewed
Perspective on Globalization
By Jim Lobe
|  In
a move that marks a major change in policy, Washington's
influential ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, has
disclosed that President George W Bush has authorized
him to open direct talks with Iran about stabilizing
Iraq.
The announcement came in an interview with Newsweek
magazine. The two countries have not held direct talks
since mid-May 2003, shortly after the US ouster of Saddam
Hussein.
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At that time, the administration charged that al-Qaeda attacks
carried out in Saudi Arabia had been coordinated from Iranian
territory. It promptly broke off an ongoing diplomatic dialogue
with Iran in Geneva that was led by Khalilzad himself and
dealt primarily with Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I've been authorized by the president to engage the
Iranians as I engaged them in Afghanistan directly,"
Khalilzad told Newsweek. "There will be meetings, and
that's also a departure and an adjustment [to US policy)."
The decision to reopen direct talks with Iran, which has
not yet reacted to Khalilzad's announcement, provoked a heated
intra-administration debate earlier this fall about engaging
Iran more deeply, particularly in light of US concerns - and
threats - concerning Tehran's nuclear program.
Some hardliners, including neo-conservatives associated with
the Committee on the Present Danger, have urged the administration
to open an interest section in Tehran to gain more direct
access to and intelligence about opposition groups. They argue
that with sufficient US support, these groups could subvert
the regime in much the same way that US support for Solidarity
in Poland allegedly helped create the conditions for the end
of communist rule there.
The latest move goes against those who have warned against
any steps that could be seen as granting the Iranian administration
international legitimacy, particularly in light of the hardline
rhetoric of the country's new president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
"On the one hand, I think it's a good idea to maintain
back-channel contacts with adversaries," said Raymond
Tanter, a former National Security Council staffer, whose
Iran Policy Committee has called for Washington to deploy
against Tehran the Iraq-based Mujahideen-e Khalq, which is
listed as a terrorist group by the State Department.
"On the other hand, when you go public after Ahmadinejad
says he wants to wipe Israel off the map, it seems to reward
Iranian belligerence. I don't know why it's being done."
But to a critic of the hardliners, University of Michigan
Middle East historian Juan Cole, the message was clear. "It's
a sign of desperation and a recognition that [the administration]
needs Iranian goodwill to get out of Iraq," he told Inter
Press Service. "To the extent you can have a soft landing
in Iraq, the Iranians have to be involved."
Indeed, Khalilzad depicted the decision as part of a more
general strategy, long urged by realists such as Bush Senior's
national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and some Democrats,
including the party's ranking foreign policy spokesman, Senator
Joseph Biden, to enlist the cooperation of Baghdad's neighbors
in stabilizing Iraq sufficiently to permit a substantial drawdown
of US troops.
That goal has become far more urgent in the past month as
public support for the US presence in Iraq has plummeted,
as has confidence in Bush's performance there and in the general
"war on terror".
As Bush's poll numbers have dropped to levels not seen since
the Richard Nixon administration in the early 1970s, Democrats
have become more aggressive in urging a major policy shift
toward realism, while Republicans have grown restive. The
White House was badly shaken earlier this month when a majority
of Senate Republicans voted with Democrats to require the
administration to submit regular reports on prospects for
withdrawing substantial numbers of troops in 2006 and progress
in training Iraqi troops to take their place.
Even if the administration has been slow - at least rhetorically
- to react to the erosion of public support, the Pentagon,
particularly senior military officers who have been talking
up the necessity of a substantial withdrawal in 2006 since
last summer, has seen the writing on the wall for some time.
According to a number of published reports, the Pentagon
has prepared plans to begin withdrawing large numbers of the
nearly 160,000 US troops currently deployed in Iraq to about
140,000 soon after next month's elections, to about 115,000
by next July and about 10,000 or less by next November's mid-term
Congressional elections.
But those hopes are based not only on the military's ability
to train and equip tens of thousands of members of Iraq's
armed forces and police, but also on a political strategy
to both reduce the strength and virulence of the largely Sunni
insurgency. At the same time, it is key to ensure that Shi'ite
groups, especially the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution
in Iraq (SCIRI), that are most closely tied to Tehran, are
prepared to go along with any measures that may be needed
to pacify the Sunnis.
It is in this light that the intensified diplomacy within
the region of the past several weeks should be seen - particularly
last week's Arab League meeting in Cairo where both Sunni
and Shi'ite Iraqi parties, as well as the predominantly Sunni
Arab governments that make up the league, joined together
to call for reconciliation and a withdrawal of non-Arab troops.
The fact that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, who has long
been close to Iran, flew immediately to Tehran after the meeting
did not go unnoticed.
Nor was it missed in Washington that, two weeks after Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice publicly raised the possibility
of direct talks with Iran, Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi,
a long-time friend of Khalilzad who had fallen out of favor
in Washington 18 months ago amid charges that he was working
with Iranian intelligence, held high-level talks in Tehran
just before arriving in Washington in early November for the
first time in two years.
While Chalabi was received rapturously by hardline neo-conservatives
at the American Enterprise Institute, which did so much to
champion his efforts to bring US troops to Iraq, it now appears
that his official reception by senior administration officials,
including Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and
Vice President Dick Cheney, was linked to his perceived usefulness
in extricating those troops from a political quagmire - and,
more specifically, gaining Tehran's cooperation in doing so.
"Perhaps that's why he was given such a good reception,"
noted Cole.
Washington's growing reliance on and support for regional
diplomacy marks a serious setback to neo-conservatives who,
long before the Iraq war, had championed the unilateral imposition
of a Pax Americana in the Middle East that would put an end
to what in their view constituted the chief threats to Israel's
security - Arab nationalism and Iranian theocracy.
Now, two-and-a-half years after invading Iraq to put that
peace into place, the administration finds itself seeking
the support of both forces.
Jim Lobe is the Washington correspondent for the international
news service Inter Press Service. He is also on the advisory
board of Foreign Policy in Focus. |
