With the replacement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with Robert Gates, a member of the Baker-Hamilton Commission who came out for diplomatic engagement with Iran in 2004, it now appears all but certain that the commission will recommend a diplomatic dialogue with both Iran and Syria as an approach to stabilizing Iraq. The question is just how far-reaching the recommendation will be. Will the commission call for negotiations with Iran in the framework of a “grand bargain” that would address the full range of issues dividing the two countries or suggest a narrow approach that tries to get Iranian cooperation on Iraq without having to make significant concessions to Iranian interests?
The grand bargain approach is unlikely to gain acceptance of the political and foreign policy elite as long as it clings to an unrealistic understanding of the power relationship between the United States and Iran. The precondition for a new diplomatic policy toward Iran and Iraq, therefore, is the acceptance of the reality that the United States does not have the power to impose a solution on Iran but must make major concessions to Iranian interests in order to achieve it own interests.
But a “grand bargain” represents the only real hope of for finding a way of curbing the sectarian violence in Iraq and avoiding a regional conflagration over the Iranian nuclear program. It has the advantage of being able to refer to an Iranian proposal to the United States in spring 2003 which laid out a very concrete framework for negotiating such a bargain.
Few political leaders are aware of the substance of the 2003 Iranian proposal, because major news media have never fully reported it. But that proposal, which is now a matter of public record, responded to U.S. interests on all four issues on which the Bush administration had made public demands on it. The proposal offered to use Iranian influence in Iraq to support “political stabilization and the establishment of democratic institutions and a non-religious government,” disavowing the aim of imposing a Shiite theocracy on Iraq. And it offers “full transparency” to provide assurances that it is not developing weapons of mass destruction.
Most important politically for the United States, however, Iranian leaders offered to stop “material support to Palestinian opposition groups…from Iranian territory” as well as “pressure on these organizations to stop violent actions against civilians within [Israel’s] borders of 1967.” And it offered to accept the Arab League “Beirut declaration”—a Saudi-sponsored initiative in March 2002 which proposed a comprehensive peace, including the establishment of normal relations, with Israel based on Israel’s withdrawal to pre-1967 war lines.
What Iran wanted in return for these concessions was an end to U.S. “hostile behavior,” including the “axis of evil” tag and its designation as a “terrorist” state, as well as end to commercial sanctions, “decisive action” against anti-Iranian MEK terrorists, especially on U.S. territory, and access to peaceful nuclear and other technologies. Finally Iran wanted recognition of its “legitimate security interest in the region”—a phrase that has been interpreted as referring to security guarantees against U.S. attack and recognition as a party to future security arrangements in the region.
These points leave many questions unanswered, particularly in regard to how the Iranians would propose to provide assurances that it is not going to obtain nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the proposal suggests a much greater willingness on Iran’s part to take its place in a stable regional order than the U.S. national security elite has believed in the past. A pragmatic search for alternatives to a failed policy would surely require a full exploration of the Iranian offer.
Up to now, however, the political consensus in Washington has firmly rejected a broad diplomatic effort that would deal with Iran’s major political-diplomatic interests and grievances as well as U.S. interests. Although Gates and former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezinski called for “selective political engagement” with Iran in their 2004 report for the Council on Foreign Relations, for example, they explicitly ruled out a “grand bargain” as unrealistic.
The main source of resistance to a grand bargain is the illusion that the United States can still rely on coercion—through sanctions and the threat of force—to get Iran to give up the nuclear option. The Bush administration is not alone in being guided by that illusion. It was also the fundamental premise of the 2004 Gates-Brzezinski report, which observed that the United States could engage Iran more successfully than it had in the previous 25 years because “the U.S. military intervention along Iran’s flanks in both Afghanistan and Iraq has changed the geopolitical landscape in the region.”
It is also argued that Iran is now so overconfident, because of the U.S. debacle in Iraq, it is no longer afraid of U.S. attack and therefore has no motivation to reach a broad compromise with the United States. But that objection assumes that the only Iranian reason for offering concessions to the United States is fear of attack. In fact, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei opposed negotiations with the United States in the 1990s because he felt that Iran was too weak to defend its interests adequately in such negotiations.
Since 2003, the dramatic political changes in the region, including the coming to power of friendly Shiite regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the growing strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hamas regime in Palestine have convinced Tehran that this is a good time to bargain with the United States. Khamenei’s top foreign affairs adviser, Ali Akbar Velatyati, told a seminar last May, “Now we have the power to haggle, why do we not haggle?”
Iran’s leadership is motivated to “haggle” with the United States not primarily because it is afraid of the United States, but because it needs the United States help to fulfill two ambitions: to be integrated fully into the global economic system, and to take it place as a legitimate regional power in the Middle East. That gives the United States strong bargaining leverage with Iran, but it is not the power to compel Iran to do something that it believes is not in its interests.
Now that much of the braggadocio has been drained out of the Bush administration, one might expect the national security elite to become much more interested in traditional diplomatic bargaining with Iran. But most of that elite remain profoundly uncomfortable, with the idea of real bargaining with Tehran, in which legitimate Iranian political-security interests would have to be recognized. The relationship these former officials and pundits prefer is one in which the United States and its allies tell Iran what is demanded of it, and what positive and negative inducements can be expected, depending on its behavior.
Kenneth Pollack advocated that approach as an alternative to a grand bargain with Iran in an article in Foreign Affairs last year. That same “carrots and sticks” approach is now being pushed by the National Review, with emphasis on the need for tough economic sanctions. The specialists on the use of power have been operating for years on the basis of the assumption that American dominance confers the ability to coerce smaller states, and they are loathe to give it up.
We can expect a combination of right-wing hawks and centrist national security specialists to put up a strong fight in the coming weeks against the option of a grand bargain and in favor an approach that does not require real diplomatic concessions to Iran. The belief that the United States should be able to prevail in a confrontation with a third-rate power like Iran still runs deep in Washington.
But the recent American experience with Iran in the past few years has repeatedly contradicted that belief. What it shows is that when U.S. demands involve interests that Iran regards as vital, threats and intimidation are counterproductive. The bloody debacle in Iraq only makes the absence of U.S. ability to coerce more obvious. Until that fundamental lesson is absorbed by the national security elite, the United States will continue to be struggling with its demons rather than extricating itself from the Middle East.
