It is unfortunate that Secretary Rice did not meet with Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki at last week's conference on Iraq in Sharm el Sheik. It is imperative that the administration find other ways to initiate discussions, perhaps in private, to pave the way for an American strategic opening to Iran. Why?
The short-run reason was given by the Baker Commission last December. Iranian cooperation is essential to stabilize Iraq's southeastern boarder. Containing sectarian conflicts within the country and limiting the flow of terrorists can't happen without Iran's help. The faster the Administration realizes this, and acts on it, the better.
But the U.S. also has longer-term regional goals in common with Iran that will be well-served by strategic cooperation. Iran can be powerfully destructive of democratic and American interests in the region. Their support for Hezbollah is a case in point. A large part of the explanation for this is that the Bush administration gives Tehran every incentive to behave as spoilers. And they are greatly strengthened in that ability by our removal of their two principal adversaries in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Including Iran as one of the "Axis of Evil" in the President's 2002 State of the Union amazed a government in Tehran that had been actively cooperating with us in Afghanistan. The Administration has continued demonizing Iranians at every turn, strengthening the hand of the conservatives who took over Iran's parliament in 2004.
If we give them the right incentives, however, Iran's leaders can refocus on the interests we share in common. Like us, they have no desire to see a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan. We also share a common interest in the territorial integrity of Iraq. Yes, in the present climate, Tehran has every reason to ramp up the costs of the American occupation. But if the Iraqi civil war dismembers the country, this will precipitate huge problems for Iran with its Kurdish populations in the north -- not to mention a massive refugee crisis. It would be better for Iran if the Shiite-led government, that the U.S. also supports, survives in Iraq.
Iran has long been a status-quo power in the Middle East. Iran has not attacked any country since the eighteenth century. Iran harbors no territorial claims against any of its neighbors. Iran has the most democratic political system in the region after Israel's. Elections there produce turnovers in government that affect policy.
There is little investment, among Iran's predominantly Persian population, in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There is comparatively little anti-Semitism. Iran has a substantial Jewish population--about twenty-five thousand with twenty synagogues in Tehran. There is even a constitutionally guaranteed Jewish seat in the country's parliament. Despite the hostility of the current leadership, much of the population is decidedly Western in orientation. When communism collapsed we found that Russians wanted Levi jeans and MTV. There is comparable demand for Western lifestyles among Iranians.
There is considerable evidence that Tehran wants to cooperate. Nicholas Kristof has documented their recent overtures in The New York Times. But the mullahs have been showing an interest in cooperation for some time. In June of 2006, they signaled that they were reigning in their hard-line President Ahmadinejad by creating a new Strategic Council for Foreign Relations, which included figures who had been associated with the reformist Khatami era. Earlier this year, they publicly admonished Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denialism.
Of course, our cooperation with Iran must be limited. Working with Iran is essential to contain the threats that will continue emanating from Iraq, but Iran also needs containing. There is no contradiction here. Engagement for one set of purposes can co-exist with containment for another. A strategic opening to China served our goal of containing the USSR during the Cold War, but this did not diminish the need to contain China as well. The Chinese example is also salutary for those who argue that we should attack Iran because it is developing nuclear weapons. This makes about as much sense as it would have done to attack China in the 1950s.
An American opening to Iran would also complicate regional competition in beneficial ways. As the tensions at Sharm el Sheik this week suggest, the Sunni dominated governments in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia would not like it. But it is far from clear that those regimes want to see a Shiite-led democracy survive in Iraq.
George Kennan, the original architect of containment, noted that we should avoid giving our adversaries common cause. He welcomed the rise of Tito-ism in Yugoslavia for the challenge it represented to Soviet hegemony and the competition it fostered among communist regimes. As I argue in my book Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy against Global Terror, we should take a comparable view of global Islam. The Bush Administration takes the opposite tack, herding adversaries into Samuel Huntington's "clash-of-civilizations" dystopia at every turn.
If we persist in rebuffing Iran, the Tehran government will keep working against us throughout the region. Why would it not? The massive display of American weakness in Iraq makes it obvious that our capacity to threaten Iran is quite limited. Refusing to work with Iran will also cause its leadership to seek allies elsewhere. If no one listens to them in Washington, perhaps someone in Moscow will.