Not long ago, Tehran’s hardliners were just one faction among many. But a series of diplomatic blunders by the Bush administration has put these guardians of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in the driver’s seat—and made war much more likely.
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Shut out: Ousted nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani might have succeeded with stronger U.S. backing.
When it comes to foreign policy, the Bush administration has often made the perfect the enemy of the good. It wasted years seeking the removal of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat before it got serious about trying to broker an Arab-Israeli peace deal. Now, with barely a year left in office, it finds itself trying to reconcile a weakened Israel and a fractured Palestine. It ignored Iraqi history by dismantling powerful, centralized institutions and trying to re-create Iraq as a democratic, free-market state. More than four years later, U.S. officials are still struggling to salvage a stable nation from the wreckage.
The administration has followed a similar pattern—but with potentially even more disastrous consequences—in its policy toward Iran. In applying new unilateral sanctions against the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Bush administration hopes to intensify divisions within the Iranian government so that more “reasonable” figures will benefit. So far, however, U.S. policy has had the opposite effect, boosting Iranian hardliners who argue that the Bush administration has no interest in reconciling with Iran and that Tehran’s best course is to reach bomb capacity as soon as possible.
The recent resignation of Ali Larijani, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, is a case in point. Caught between American neocons and Iranian hardliners, Larijani stepped down last month and was replaced by Saeed Jalili, an obscure foreign ministry official and crony of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Larijani could have achieved more with timely U.S. backing. In the winter of 2005-2006, he began making overtures to the Bush administration, going so far as to praise U.S. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley as a “logical thinker” in an interview with me in Tehran. Larijani also authorized a deputy, Mohammad Javad Jaffari, to set up back-channel talks with Hadley or a designated emissary. The White House never replied.
In March 2006, Larijani went further and publicly accepted a prior U.S. offer for talks on Iraq. A week later, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed Larijani’s acceptance, the first time Khamenei had publicly approved direct talks with the United States. Again, the Bush administration demurred, even though the idea was originally an American one. U.S. officials said that Iran would use the talks to distract from growing international pressure over its nuclear program. There was also concern in Washington that Iraqis, who were struggling to form a new government at the time, would think that the United States and Iran were deciding their political fate over the heads of the Iraqi people.
The U.S. failure to take yes for an answer further undermined Larijani and spurred Khamenei to tilt toward the conservative faction led by Ahmadinejad and his top clerical ally, Ayatollah Mohammad Mesbah Yazdi, who called for accelerating the nuclear program in defiance of U.S. and U.N. demands.
There are a few positive signs about the internal political battle, though still no indication that Iran will bow to external pressure over the nuclear issue. A new coalition of pragmatic conservatives and reformers did well in municipal elections in December, profiting from Ahmadinejad’s gross mismanagement of the economy. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president often seen in the West as a man willing to cut a deal, recently won election as head of the Assembly of Experts, the body that will choose the next supreme leader. Parliamentary elections this March will test whether the pendulum is moving away from the hardliners. In the meantime, however, foreign policy remains in the hands of Ahmadinejad’s supporters. Even the foreign minister, Manucher Mottaki, is not hardline enough for the Iranian president. He is rumored to be on his way out, too.
It’s no surprise, then, that U.S.-Iran talks about Iraq finally began in May this year in an atmosphere so fraught with hostility over sanctions and the nuclear issue that little has come of them. Iran, meanwhile, has refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program as demanded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as a precondition for broad negotiations. A top aide to Ahmadinejad recently told me that the Iranians think Rice is lying when she says she will meet with Iran “anywhere, anytime” if Iran suspends enrichment. The Bush administration, this official said, has no interest in serious negotiations with Iran. You can hardly blame him or other Iranians for thinking this way.
It did not have to be like this. The September 11 attacks opened opportunities for lessening hostility between Iran and the United States. Iranians, virtually alone among the world’s Muslims, demonstrated spontaneously in support of the United States following 9/11. Iran’s government then cooperated with the United States in backing Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, which captured Kabul from the Taliban in November 2001. Iran also helped put together a new government for Afghanistan in collaboration with U.S. diplomats.
