American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was yesterday scathing about French plans to send an envoy to Iran to discuss the situation in Lebanon and the wider Middle East. In her view, Iran deserves complete international isolation because it refuses to curb its nuclear program. Yet also yesterday, the UN’s nuclear IAEA chief Mohammed El-Baradei warned that Washington-instigated UN sanctions imposed last month on Iran would not resolve the standoff but rather threatened to make it worse. For a UN official to go so publicly against the UN is unusual. For the French to go their own way, even after backing the Security Council Iran sanctions resolution, is not. It seems that both France and the IAEA feel rising alarm at US belligerence toward Tehran. Such disquiet will only be reinforced by the revelation yesterday that Washington has since the invasion of Iraq twice spurned diplomatic approaches by the Iranians suggesting a rapprochement.
According to a former official in Colin Powell’s State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson, in 2003, a first approach was made by the Iranian government via the Swiss, offering to cut off support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. In return, America would stop supporting the Mujahedeen Khalq who had been operating out of Iraq (with Saddam Hussein’s backing and US approval) against the Iranian regime. It was also suggested that in return for improved relations with Washington, the Iranians would be prepared to talk seriously about opening up their nuclear program to international inspection.
The State Department greeted the proposals positively. There was caution because the letter the Swiss had passed on was unsigned. However, according to Wilkerson, there were indications the communication had come from senior Iranian government people. What happened next illustrates the blinkered approach of the Bush administration. When the letter reached the desk of Vice President Dick Cheney, it was rejected out of hand with the terse retort “We don’t talk to evil”. Further it is alleged that a cable from the White House to the Swiss rudely condemned them for passing on the message in the first place.
If this information proves to be correct — and there have yet to be any denials from the administration — it is an indictment of the conduct of US Middle Eastern policy and an explanation of why the Bush White House has failed at every turn in its objectives. Put baldly, this is an administration that is completely uninterested in talking and sees the only way to gain its ends by confrontation and violence. Therefore, as a second carrier group moves into the Gulf and senior administration officials, including Rice, still talk darkly about not ruling out the military option against Iran, wiser heads are right to be concerned about where events are heading.
The Iranian approach might have been a ploy. Tehran has proved a master of diplomatic maneuver. But if the White House were serious about seeking, rather than imposing, solutions in the region, it could at least have explored the Iranian offer.
