When I visited Tehran in December 2001, politicians who previously had been wary of going on the record with a U.S. journalist said openly that the time was right to end nearly 30 years of U.S.-Iran estrangement. However, when I returned and discussed my impressions with a senior member of the White House National Security Council, he talked only of the fact that some al Qaeda members had managed to flee Afghanistan through Iran. Shortly thereafter, Israel captured a ship in the Red Sea carrying Iranian weapons said to be bound for Arafat’s Fatah faction. President Bush then decided to include Iran in his “axis of evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. Iranians who had advocated better relations with the United States were astonished and humiliated.
The White House did permit secret, direct talks between U.S. and Iranian diplomats in Europe from the fall of 2001 through May 2003. The talks, however, were tactical, not strategic. They ended in May 2003, after they were disclosed on the front page of USA Today; the administration seemed embarrassed to be caught talking to “evil.” At the same time, Iran put forward an agenda for comprehensive talks on all the issues dividing the two countries, including the nuclear program and Iran’s support for anti-Israel groups. But the Bush administration did not reply. Baghdad had just fallen, and a triumphant Bush believed he did not need Iran’s help in Iraq. Instead, Bush and Rice argued that a democratic Iraq would hasten the fall of neighboring autocratic regimes. At that time, Iran had no centrifuges spinning at Natanz, Iraq was not yet a bloody morass, and Iranian religious conservatives had not yet begun a rise to power culminating in the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005.
Rice did offer in May 2006 to talk to Iran in company with European nations, if Iran would suspend uranium enrichment. But in announcing the offer, she discredited it in Iranian eyes when she insisted that such talks would not mean that the United States was recognizing the legitimacy of the Iranian government. “What’s being provided legitimacy here is the negotiating process,” not Iran, she said.
It is doubtful that Iran will now give up a nuclear program that it has withstood so much punishment to build. That increases the possibility of a U.S.-Iran military confrontation, which would be a disaster for Iran, the region, and much of the rest of the world. The price of oil would skyrocket, making $100 a barrel look cheap. Much of the planet would plunge into recession. The U.S. presence in Iraq at the behest of a Shiite government could become untenable. Anti-U.S. and anti-Israel terrorism would escalate to new heights.
The tragedy is that the dire choice—between bombing Iran, and Iran with a bomb—could have been avoided. Yet the pattern of offering too little, too late continues.
