Yesterday, President Obama called a small group of journalists into the White House to talk about Iran. According to the Washington Post's David Ignatius, Obama's agenda was to signal Iran that the United States might "accept a deal that allows Iran to maintain its civilian nuclear program, so long as Iran provides 'confidence-building measures' to verify that it is not building a bomb". The president said that his administration is prepared to lay out "a clear set of steps that we would consider sufficient to show that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons." The president's vision for renewed diplomacy with Tehran also included a proposal for talks on Afghanistan, where the two sides "have a 'mutual interest' in fighting the Taliban."
That the president feels he must call in Western journalists to signal Tehran is a sad commentary on the Obama administration's failure to develop a discreet and reliable channel through which to communicate with Iranian leaders. Ignatius reminds us that Obama "sent two secret letters" last year to the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Obama also opted not to respond to a congratulatory letter sent to him after the 2008 U.S. presidential election by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- a letter that Ahmadinejad has told us was "unprecedented" and "not easy to get done" on his side. In that context, Obama's letters to Khamenei were seen in Tehran as an attempt to go "over the head" of Iran's elected president -- another iteration, in a failed pattern dating to Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra scandal, of U.S. administrations trying to create channels to individual Iranian leaders rather than dealing with the Islamic Republic as a system. This amused neither Khamenei nor Ahmadinejad.
Furthermore, it is not clear that the Iranians will receive whatever signal the president is trying to send through his meeting with a group of Western journalists. It seems that not all the journalists got the signal. While Ignatius emphasizes Obama's strategic depth and genuine interest in a peaceful nuclear settlement, The Economist's Peter David reports that Obama "unveiled no new policy" and began "to talk more about the other unspecified 'options on the table.'" Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic thinks the real point was to send a message -- to non-Iranian international and U.S. domestic audiences -- that "Obama's policy of engagement joined with sanctions is having the desired effect of isolating Iran from the international community" and that it will be at least a year before Tehran comes close to even a theoretically plausible nuclear "breakout" capability. Ambinder's colleague, Jeffrey Goldberg, "got the sense that this session represented something of a victory lap for [Obama's] national security team." (Goldberg's presence in the briefing suggests to us that at least part of the administration's agenda was to send reassuring messages to Israel and pro-Israel constituencies in the United States.)
Ignatius and several other attendees report that the president referred to "rumblings" the administration is picking up that new sanctions are having a political effect in Iran. A senior administration official noted specifically the bazaar strike last month as an example. But this is another sad indicator of how badly informed the administration's analysis of Iranian domestic developments is. The bazaar strike -- which was, effectively, a repeat of a similar episode in 2008 -- was a largely successful effort by a traditional business elite to resist the imposition of additional taxes by the Iranian government (something that the IMF is recommending). It was not in any way a signal that the bazaaris are now, as a result of sanctions, allied to what is left of the Green movement.
But, apart from the administration's maladroit handling of its diplomatic exchanges with Tehran, poor grasp of on-the-ground realities in Iran, and mixed messaging, it is important to consider the substance of what the president said. Obama's ideas about engaging the Islamic Republic are not bad, at a relatively high level of generalization. They are certainly much better than those of most of the cabinet- and sub-cabinet-level officials he has appointed to work on Iran policy. But, as in the past, the real question is whether Obama is ready to expend political capital, assume political risks, and take hard policy decisions to make his ideas effective vis-a-vis Tehran. To date, Obama has not been prepared to do so, and that -- not Iranian "intransigence" or purported internal divisions -- is the real reason his efforts at engagement have not borne fruit.
On the nuclear front, the key issue is whether the president's severely hedged openness to a deal that might allow Tehran "to maintain its civilian nuclear program" includes a willingness to accept Iran moving ahead with internationally safeguarded uranium enrichment on its own territory. In advance of renewed nuclear talks, which seem likely to start next month, senior Iranian officials say that Tehran is prepared to discontinue enriching uranium at the nearly-20 percent level required to fabricate fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR) -- a thoroughly safeguarded facility in the middle of Tehran that produces medical isotopes -- if the international community guarantees the provision of new fuel for the TRR and accepts the Joint Declaration on nuclear matters that Iran negotiated with Brazil and Turkey in May.
There is nothing new in these Iranian positions -- which are certainly not the product of intensified international, U.S., and European sanctions. Since the Iranians first raised the TRR issue last spring, they have always linked their pursuit of enrichment to the near-20 percent level to the international community's failure to come through, in a credible and timely way, to help Tehran refuel the TRR. Iran accepted the idea of "swapping" a significant part of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU, enriched only to 3-4 percent) for new fuel for the TRR -- an idea originated by the Obama administration and formalized last fall by the International Atomic Energy Agency's then-director, Mohammed El Baradei. But, when the Iranians asked to negotiate particular details of the plan, the Obama administration -- under domestic and Israeli pressure -- turned Baradei's proposal into a "take it or leave it" proposition, something that Baradei himself says should not have been done (see here). By not bargaining with Iran, the United States handed Tehran the perfect justification to start enriching to higher levels -- which is precisely what Tehran did, starting in February 2010.
By the time Brazil and Turkey stepped up their diplomatic efforts with Iran over the TRR issue earlier this year, the administration had already decided to keep previous commitments extracted from it by Israel and pro-Israel interest groups in Washington to move ahead with a new UN sanctions resolution. The administration cynically insisted that Brazil and Turkey include provisions in any deal they might broker with Tehran, which U.S. officials assumed would trigger an Iranian rejection; some administration officials calculated that, when the Brazilians and Turks "struck out" in Tehran, it would be possible to leverage them into supporting new sanctions in the Security Council. Ultimately, of course, the Iranians accepted the terms Obama spelled out in a letter to his Brazilian counterpart in April 2010 (see here); it was the Obama administration that reneged on the TRR deal, so that it could accelerate work on a new sanctions resolution that would finally be adopted in June.
Even against this backdrop, Tehran continues to say that it would stop enriching at higher levels if it is guaranteed new fuel for the TRR -- and the United States and its partners accept the Joint Declaration Iranian officials negotiated with Brazil and Turkey in May. This latter point underscores the issue of enrichment -- at the lower, 3-4 percent level -- as the heart of the matter. The Iran-Turkey-Brazil deal includes, as its first substantive item, a forthright acknowledgment that the Islamic Republic has the "right" to "develop research, production and use of nuclear energy (as well as nuclear fuel cycle including enrichment activities) for peaceful purposes without discrimination."
In the face of multiple UN Security Council resolutions demanding that the Islamic Republic suspend all uranium enrichment, Tehran wants its right to enrich acknowledged as an essential condition for progress toward a larger nuclear deal. In our conversations with them, Iranian officials have consistently indicated that acceptance of safeguarded enrichment in Iran would open up possibilities for cooperative solutions to other contentious points in the Islamic Republic's nuclear diplomacy with the world's major powers -- including ratification and implementation of the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Obama administration remains internally divided on the enrichment issue. If President Obama is finally prepared to show real leadership on this issue and accept safeguarded enrichment in Iran, he can get a nuclear deal that addresses the proliferation concerns associated with Iran's fuel cycle activities and put relations with the Islamic Republic on a more positive trajectory. If he does not, Obama will blow yet another opportunity for strategically consequential diplomacy with Tehran.
On Afghanistan, the key question is whether President Obama is really willing to take the steps necessary to show Iran that its interests in Afghanistan are, in fact, still aligned with those of the United States. Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Tehran cooperated with the United States in Afghanistan, in part to prompt Washington to reconsider its longstanding hostility toward the Islamic Republic. But Tehran also cooperated because it accepted U.S. representations that Washington wanted an independent and stable Afghanistan that would not be hostile to Iran. (Hillary Mann Leverett was one of a small number of U.S. officials engaged in ongoing discussions with Iranian counterparts about how to deal with Afghanistan and al Qaeda during this period.)
Now that the Obama administration is acquiescing to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's efforts to negotiate power-sharing arrangements with the Taliban -- as a way of facilitating the drawdown of U.S. forces -- Tehran no longer credits Washington with either good intentions or strategic competence in Afghanistan. Obama and his advisers seem not to grasp how much the strategic situation in Afghanistan has shifted, from Tehran's point of view, since the first 18 months after 9/11. Today, Obama will have to take affirmative steps to convince Iranian policymakers that he does not intend to turn over Afghanistan to the strongly anti-Iranian Taliban and its chief external backers, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two of Iran's most important regional rivals. Otherwise, Afghanistan is likely to become a point of increasing tension between Washington and Tehran -- not an arena for cooperation.
On a positive note, Obama's Iran briefing at least affirms that he does not believe there is any reason, in the near-to-medium term, for a military confrontation. But it also provides no indication that Obama has a genuinely substantive plan to put U.S.-Iranian relations on a more stable and strategically productive footing.
A version of this post will also appear on www.RaceForIran.com
A man who has not the stature nor intelligence to speak to a genuine head of state.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/iran/
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=137166§ionid=351020101
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/02/ahmadinejad-challenges-ob_0_n_667068.html
There is a clear desire in western media to show Iran as confrontational.
I think leutenizer is right too . .. .
However, when it comes to the Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Iraq etc etc, they will not compromise with factions that are indoctrinated by the Saudis, Taliban or the Pakistanis. Their 3000 year old cultural, lingual connections in these places will put them at odds with the Arab and Sunni fundamentalism. They will not tolerate any foreign ideology that will influence that fabric and are willing to defend it as always.
The only way out for us is to have the Iranians on our side. End of the story.
Iran has been marginalized by US for political reasons but de-facto control of Iran over all issues in central Asia is there for everybody to observe.
One symbolic act that shows this cultural connection is the reconstruction of ancient silk road.
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=137645
If the channel was there and we knew, what would be so secret about it?
There are plenty of channels for Obama to communicate with Iran. Clinton used Christian Amanpour, now there is IAEA. Swiss Embassy, Arab league, Turkey, Qatar and dozen others. But wouldn't believe discrete communication considering new rounds of sanctions. By going public, Obama is putting himself on record.
The only "sad commentary" is that Obama is judged a failure when he hasn't changed 30 years of US policy towards Iran, in the 1.5 years he has been in office.
Reagan, both Bushes, Clinton - they did nothing to communicate with Iran.
But now, less than 2 years into his term, Obama is a "failure"?
The same ridiculous cant of most of the articles here. The impatience of youth, I guess :-)
More generally, the U.S., in cooperation with the Saudi monarchy, was the main force that helped turn right-wing political Islam from a marginal phenomenon in most of the Arab world to a mainstream one. See, for example, 'Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam' by Robert Dreyfuss. (http://www.robertdreyfuss.com/thebook.htm)
The UN Security Council adopted in early June a fourth round of sweeping sanctions against The Islamic Republic of Iran, which included an expanded arms embargo as well "tougher financial controls". In a bitter irony, this resolution was passed within days of the United Nations Secrity Council's outright refusal to adopt a motion condemning Israel for its attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters.
Both China and Russia, pressured by the US, have endorsed the UNSC sanctions' regime, to their own detriment. Their decision within the UNSC contributes to weakening their own military alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation organization (SCO), in which Iran has observer status. The Security Council resolution freezes China and Russia's respective bilateral military cooperation and trade agreements with Iran. It has serious repercussions on Iran's air defense system which in part depends on Russian technology and expertise.
The Security Council resolution grants a de facto "green light" to wage a pre-emptive war against Iran.
The American Inquisition: Building a Political Consensus for War
In chorus, the Western media has branded Iran as a threat to global security in view of its alleged (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. Echoing official statements, the media is now demanding the implementation of punitive bombings directed against Iran so as to safeguard Israel's security.
The Western media is beating the drums of war.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20100801&articleId=20403
"Surely there is some way we can paper over this and not lose all our values".
1. Which "nuc. weapons"? the ones they dont have?
2. Some of the worst dictators of the world are your friends and that somehow that doesn't put a dent on your conscience and nor your "values".
Puleeeez, take your sermon to your personal church of hypocrisy.
In an interview with NPR on his latest New Yorker Article, titled ‘Preparing the battlefield', the renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reveals more striking details of his findings on the aim of the $400 million budgeted US covert operations inside Iran. He provides valuable information on US military preparations to strike the country, on the total expansion of the Bush Administration's executive power, about the US recognition of Iran's overall positive role in Iraq and on the US support for the anti-Iran terrorist organisations Jondollah, PJAK and MEK.
Hersh explains that the aim of the US covert operations inside Iran is to create a pretext for attack with the goal of regime change. “The strategic thinking behind this covert operation is to provoke enough trouble and chaos so that the Iranian government makes the mistake of taking aggressive action which will give the impression of a country in acute turmoil”, he said. “Then you have what the White House calls the ‘casus belli', a reason to attack the country. That is the thinking and it is very crazy.”
http://www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/5551
I've had my past disagreements with the Leveretts and will not bother with some of their characteristic tone here, but I am more or less in agreement - though they minimize the bazaar strike a wee bit in my opinion and mentioning the one in 2008 begs a question... but I won't go there. This, along with what I believe to be the Kerry line reiterating engagement and against war makes me slightly more optimistic than I had been - especially after the resignation of John Limbert. The mixed messaging and continued factional divide in the administration doesn't give me rose-colored glasses in the least, though.
What would the effect of sending a letter back to Ahmadinejad been, anyway? Especially since he did, as you say, go to such trouble? Do we not remember the Khatami letter incident? When the Supreme Leader was offended that they would try to 'undercut' him? Things being as they are, what is the use of writing to someone who doesn't have a final say regarding Afghanistan or the nuclear issue, anyway?
If the American populace were more attuned, I'd have been all for returning the letter, which was far better crafted than the one to Bush. Ahmadinejad had several requests to make of American policy, it would have been fair for Obama to send back a letter in kind.
I'm all for this as much as a renewed cooperation can be found in Afghanistan and as much as it can diminish the bogeyman of the US exploited in domestic Iranian politics. I would love to know how Flynt Leverett knows there are no reliable, discreet channels, though. Especially when Obama said in his briefing that “High-level officials in Iran had investigated the possibility of re-engaging with the P5-plus-one" coupled with the autumn face-to-face meeting of US and Iranian officials in Geneva, or the recent weeks communications via the EU and Ankara. Have they all been shelved all of a sudden? Even Ahmadinejad has hinted that such channels still exist. Such an assertion was typical Leverett.
That part seemed about as mature as the recent incident of attacking Karroubi with eggs.