One of the most important under-reported news stories of the last few years is Iran’s 2003 efforts to reach out to the United States in order to strike some kind of peace deal. In June 2006, the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler reported on the document that the Bush administration chose not to take seriously.
Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces three years ago, an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States, and the fax suggested everything was on the table — including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups.
But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran, former administration officials said.
As Flynt Leverett noted, “At the time, the Iranians were not spinning centrifuges, they were not enriching uranium,” making the overture a key opportunity for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement. The Bush gang wasn’t interested, so Iran went back to developing a nuclear program.
But since the Iranian offer went to the State Department, what, exactly, did State do with the document? Who saw it? How seriously was it taken? What kind of review did it receive? Who ultimately decided to blow it off?
No one has asked these questions of Bush’s State Department to date, so it was encouraging to see Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) bring it up this morning during a committee hearing with Rice.
As Spencer Ackerman noted, Rice said, “I don’t remember reading” the document. She said it was possible that the State Department received the fax from the Iranians (by way of the Swiss), but she thought she would remember hearing about a step as dramatic as Iranian recognition of Israel.
That would be a compelling argument, if she hadn’t said something different last year.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stressed that the U.S. decision to join the nuclear talks was not an effort to strike a “grand bargain” with Iran. [In June 2006], she made the first official confirmation of the Iranian proposal in an interview with National Public Radio.
“What the Iranians wanted earlier was to be one-on-one with the United States so that this could be about the United States and Iran,” said Rice, who was Bush’s national security adviser when the fax was received. “Now it is Iran and the international community, and Iran has to answer to the international community. I think that’s the strongest possible position to be in.”
To his credit, Dodd wants to get to the bottom of this, and asked Rice to provide the cable traffic from the State Department during that period to the committee in closed session. As Ackerman noted, we may yet learn “what Iran was willing to concede in the wake of the Iraq war — years before the rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the increased tension with the Bush administration.”
And, as long as we’re on the subject, I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention Craig Unger’s fascinating article in this month’s Vanity Fair about the same neoconservatives, using the same arguments, pushing for a war with Iran now who pushed for a war with Iraq before.
“Everything the advocates of war said would happen hasn’t happened,” says the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, an influential conservative who backed the Iraq invasion. “And all the things the critics said would happen have happened. [The president’s neoconservative advisers] are effectively saying, ‘Invade Iran. Then everyone will see how smart we are.’ But after you’ve lost x number of times at the roulette wheel, do you double-down?”
Note to the neocons: I think we all know exactly how smart you are.