POLITICS-US:
Realists Tighten Grip as Talks Open with Iran
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31217
Jim Lobe
In a new indication that the balance of power within the
administration of President George W. Bush has tilted strongly in
favour of the realists, Washington's influential ambassador to Iraq,
Zalmay Khalilzad, has disclosed that Bush has authorised him to open
direct talks with Iran about stabilising Iraq.
WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (IPS) - The announcement, which came in an
interview with Newsweek magazine, marks a major change in policy. The
two countries have not held direct talks since mid-May 2003, shortly
after the U.S. ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, when the
influence of neo-conservatives was at its zenith.
At that time, the administration charged that al Qaeda attacks carried
out in Saudi Arabia had been coordinated from Iranian territory. It
promptly broke off an ongoing diplomatic dialogue with Iran in Geneva
that was led by Khalilzad himself and dealt primarily with Afghanistan
and Iraq.
"I've been authorised by the president to engage the Iranians as I
engaged them in Afghanistan directly," Khalilzad told Newsweek. "There
will be meetings, and that's also a departure and an adjustment (to
U.S. policy)," he added.
The decision to reopen direct talks with Iran, which has not yet
reacted to Khalilzad's announcement, provoked a heated
intra-administration debate earlier this fall about engaging Iran more
deeply, particularly in light of U.S. concerns -- and threats --
concerning Tehran's nuclear programme.
Some hard-liners, including neo-conservatives associated with the
Committee on the Present Danger, have urged the administration to open
an interest section in Tehran to gain more direct access to and
intelligence about opposition groups. They argue that with sufficient
U.S. support, these groups could subvert the regime in much the same
way that U.S. support for Solidarity in Poland allegedly helped create
the conditions for the end of Communist rule there.
But others have warned against any steps that could be seen as
granting the regime international legitimacy would be a mistake,
particularly in light of the hard-line rhetoric of the country's
controversial new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"On the one hand, I think it's a good idea to maintain back-channel
contacts with adversaries," says Raymond Tanter, a former National
Security Council staffer whose Iran Policy Committee has called for
Washington to deploy the Iraq-based Mujahadin-e Khalq, which is listed
as a "terrorist" group by the State Department, against Tehran.
"On the other hand, when you go public after Ahmadinejad says he wants
to wipe Israel off the map, it seems to reward Iranian belligerence. I
don't know why it's being done," he says.
But to a critic of the hard-liners, University of Michigan Middle East
historian Juan Cole, the message was clear. "It's a sign of
desperation and a recognition that (the administration) needs Iranian
goodwill to get out of Iraq," he told IPS. "To the extent you can have
a soft landing in Iraq, the Iranians have to be involved."
Indeed, Khalilzad depicted the decision as part of a more general
strategy, long urged by realists such as Bush Sr.'s national security
adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and some Democrats, including the party's
ranking foreign policy spokesman, Sen. Joseph Biden, to enlist the
cooperation of Baghdad's neighbours in stabilising Iraq sufficiently
to permit a substantial drawdown of U.S. troops.
That goal has become far more urgent in the past month as public
support for the U.S. presence in Iraq has plummeted, as has confidence
in Bush's performance there and in the general "war on terror".
As Bush's poll numbers have dropped to levels not seen since the
Richard Nixon administration in the early 1970s, Democrats have become
more aggressive in urging a major policy shift toward realism, while
Republicans have grown restive. The White House was badly shaken
earlier this month when a majority of Senate Republicans voted with
Democrats to require the administration to submit regular reports on
prospects for withdrawing substantial numbers of troops in 2006 and
progress in training Iraqi troops to take their place.
Even if the administration has been slow -- at least rhetorically --
to react to the erosion of public support, the Pentagon, and
particularly senior military officers who have been talking up the
necessity of a substantial withdrawal in 2006 since last summer, has
seen the writing on the wall for some time.
According to a number of published reports, the Pentagon has prepared
plans to begin withdrawing large numbers of the nearly 160,000 U.S.
troops currently deployed in Iraq to about 140,000 soon after next
month's elections, to about 115,000 by next July and around 100,00 or
less by next November's mid-term Congressional elections.
But those hopes are based not only on the military's ability to train
and equip tens of thousands of members of Iraq's armed forces and
police, but also on a political strategy to both reduce the strength
and virulence of the largely Sunni insurgency. At the same time, it is
key to ensure that Shiite groups, especially the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), that are most closely tied to
Tehran, are prepared to go along with any measures that may be needed
to pacify the Sunnis.
It is in this light that the intensified diplomacy within the region
of the past several weeks should be seen -- particularly last week's
Arab League meeting in Cairo where both Sunni and Shiite Iraqi
parties, as well as the predominantly Sunni Arab governments that make
up the League, joined together to call for reconciliation and a
withdrawal of non-Arab troops. The fact that Iraqi President Jalal
Talabani, who has long been close to Iran, flew immediately to Tehran
after the meeting did not go unnoticed.
Nor was it missed here that, two weeks after Secretary of State Rice
publicly raised the possibility of direct talks with Iran, Deputy
Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi, a long-time friend of Khalilzad who had
fallen out of favour in Washington 18 months ago amid charges that he
was working with Iranian intelligence, held high-level talks in Tehran
just before arriving here in early November for the first time in two
years.
While Chalabi was received rapturously by hard-line neo-conservatives
at the American Enterprise Institute, who did so much to champion his
efforts to bring U.S. troops to Iraq, it now appears that his official
reception here by senior administration officials, including Rice,
national security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Vice President *****
Cheney, was linked to his perceived usefulness in extricating those
troops from a political quagmire -- and, more specifically, gaining
Tehran's cooperation in doing so.
"Perhaps that's why he was given such a good reception," noted Cole.
Washington's growing reliance on and support for regional diplomacy
marks a serious setback to neo-conservatives who, long before the Iraq
war, had championed the unilateral imposition of a Pax Americana in
the Middle East that would put an end to what in their view
constituted the chief threats to Israel's security -- Arab nationalism
and Iranian theocracy.
Now, two and a half years after invading Iraq to put that peace into
place, the administration finds itself seeking the support of both
forces, just as the realists had warned. (FIN/2005)
This article linked from: http://www.antiwar.com/
.
|
