Bringing Iran in from the cold

Iran isn't a mad state bent on Israel's destruction but a rational actor that wants a place at the table.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Iran, Palestine, Israel, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War, Barack Obama

Dec. 12, 2007 | Bush's disastrous legacy is now locked in place. The National Intelligence Estimate released last week, which stated that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, is an explicit repudiation of the Bush doctrine and a preemptive strike against war with Iran. The professionals have struck back against the ideologues.

But in spite of the NIE findings, Bush and the wider U.S. establishment still share a view of Iran as evil and unapproachable. Until Washington realizes that it would be better off engaging with the Iranian regime than demonizing it, its Mideast policy will continue to flounder along the failed path of Bush's "war on terror." To avoid that outcome, it's going to have to be willing to question everything it thought it knew about Iran.

Congress and the media's so-what response to the Bush administration's outrageous attempt to cook the Iran intelligence does not inspire confidence. The Bush administration sat on the NIE for more than a year, trying to change the report to make it harsher on Iran, and all the while beating the drums for war. This fact has gone largely uncriticized, even though it's Iraq all over again. Bush has gotten a pass on his deception yet again for a simple reason: America views Iran as so innately dangerous, irrational and undeterrable that it doesn't care that Bush lied about what he knew and when he knew it.

In the eyes of the mainstream media, Congress and much of the public, Iran is the ultimate bad guy, a combination of al-Qaida and Adolf Hitler. This substratum of fear and hatred, some reasonable but much irrational, explains why leading Democrats, from Harry Reid to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, have reacted so tepidly to the NIE and Bush's obvious lies about it. More important, it explains why even a Democratic president could still pursue a self-destructive course of confrontation with Tehran.

Bush has been able to keep a second bullet in his gun, even after the Iraq disaster, because the Muslim country that the United States really fears and hates isn't Iraq but Iran. The 1979 hostages drama, the fanatical image of Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran's extreme hostility to Israel combine to make Iran a nearly demonic entity in U.S. eyes. One of the reasons the NIE is so politically sensitive is that it is really not about whether a nuclear Iran threatens America but about whether it threatens Israel. The Israel connection makes it extremely difficult for any U.S. politician to advocate anything other than a confrontational stance with Iran. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's venomous comments about Israel and his repulsive flirtation with Holocaust denial, combined with Iran's support for Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist groups, have virtually ensured Iran's diplomatic isolation.

The U.S., and the rest of the world, have legitimate concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions. Beyond the doomsday scenario of an attack on Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran would trigger a regional arms race, which would make the Middle East even more unstable. But it's the existential threat to Israel that has allowed Bush to play let's-make-war-on-Iraq all over again, with just as little resistance. It's no accident that Bush used the inflammatory expression "nuclear holocaust" when discussing Iran in August. At an October press conference, Bush was even more explicit. "We got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel," Bush said. "So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

Because they don't want to come across as Neville Chamberlain, few analysts and politicians have tried to determine whether Bush's claim that Ahmadinejad wants to destroy Israel is actually true, whether Ahmadinejad would have the power to launch such an attack even if he wanted to, and whether Iran would pursue a policy that it knows would lead to its immediate and complete destruction. The status quo position of treating Iran as a rogue state prevails.

But according to an important new book, America's hard-line position on Iran is counterproductive, and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the country.

Trita Parsi's "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States" shatters the image of Iran put forward by the Bush administration. In Parsi's view, the Iranian regime is neither evil nor irrational. It is not primarily driven by religious or anti-Israeli ideology but by national self-interest. It is prepared to do just about anything, except abandon Islam, to maximize its regional power and preserve itself. It is a bitter enemy of Israel, but the enmity is based on geopolitics, not ideology, and it is prepared to make peace with Israel in return for strategic gains. Indeed, it has made many pragmatic overtures to both the U.S. and Israel; four years ago, it made an astonishing peace offer to Washington, which the Bush administration rejected out of hand.

Washington's hard line against Tehran, Parsi argues, has only strengthened rejectionists in Iran and impeded reforms. Given Iran's size, history, population, location, wealth, resources, education and military might, it is inevitably going to play a major role in the Gulf region and the Middle East. Ever since the Iranian revolution of 1979, American attempts to prevent Iran from playing this role have been largely responsible for the hostility between the two nations. It is in America's interests, and ultimately Israel's, to integrate Iran into the region as peacefully as possible.

Parsi, who is the president of the National Iranian American Council and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, bases his book on 130 in-depth interviews with Israeli, American and -- crucially -- Iranian officials and analysts. His access to Iranian policymakers gives his book unusual authority.

One of Parsi's more remarkable tales takes place in May 2003, just after U.S. troops occupied Baghdad. Fearing that the U.S. was about to invade Tehran, Iran approached the U.S. with an amazing offer. In a dialogue of "mutual respect," it offered to stop its backing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, support the transformation of Hezbollah into a disarmed political party, open up its nuclear program to international inspection and accept the Arab League's two-state plan for Israel and Palestine, thus making peace with the Jewish state. In return, Tehran asked for the U.S. to abandon its plans to topple the reign of the mullahs, end sanctions, turn over antiregime terrorists and accept Iran's legitimate interests in the region.

Secretary of State Colin Powell and others in the State Department, to which the offer was sent via a Swiss intermediary, were stunned. This was a bombshell: Iran was offering to resolve all the issues separating it, the U.S. and Israel in one fell swoop. Powell, his deputy Richard Armitage and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice took the proposal to President Bush, but the discussion was immediately stopped by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "We don't speak to evil," they said. The proposal died right then.

Next page: Although war is now unlikely, the U.S still faces a momentous decision