Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
like it.”111
Proponents of dialogue kept trying. The State Department proposed sending a consular officer to Tehran, but the Iranian government rejected the idea, and then characterized its rebuff as a “diplomatic blow” to the Americans.112 The State Department never created metrics by which to judge its outreach. It was easier to project goodwill onto the adversary.
Albright pursued diplomacy with Iran through the waning days of the Clinton administration. On March 17, 2000, she spoke to the American Iranian Council. After, in effect, apologizing for the American role in the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, she announced a number of unilateral American concessions: ending the import ban on Persian rugs, pistachios and caviar, three of Iran’s most lucrative non-oil industries; a further relaxation of visa restrictions; and progress on releasing assets frozen during the hostage crisis. The pistachio import ban pumped tens of millions of dollars into Rafsanjani’s pocket, as he had long since cornered the Iranian market.
As always, the Iranians hinted they would react positively. Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian, Iran’s ambassador at the United Nations, said that Iran would be “prepared to adopt proportionate and positive measures in return.”113 But no Iranian goodwill was forthcoming. Quite the contrary: in July, the Iranian government tested a new, enhanced missile. The Supreme Leader then declared negotiations with Washington to be “an insult and treason to the Iranian people.”114 In his mind, negotiations would only boost American influence, something to be avoided at all costs.115 Khatami asserted that the United States had not offered enough to merit a response.116
Ultimately, Albright’s concessions did more harm than good. Kharrazi seized upon her “confessions” of regret about the overthrow of Mosaddeq to issue a demand for more apologies and also for reparations.117 But rather than talk further, he stood Albright up during a planned one-on-one meeting at the United Nations.
As always, American cheerleaders for talks refused to take no for an answer. Instead, they echoed the Iranians’ argument that Clinton had not offered enough. According to Scowcroft and Lee H. Hamilton, for example, “The U.S. sanctions are the main obstacle preventing the United States from pursuing its complete range of interests with Iran.” Given the internal political squabbles in Tehran, they counseled dispensing to issue demands for a “quid pro quo form of reciprocity.”118 In effect, they suggested a free pass for the Islamic Republic to avoid making any concessions, and changed diplomacy from a game of chess into one of solitaire.
Proponents of engagement elevated imagery over substance. Thus, Albright announced that the United States would no longer speak of rogue regimes, but would henceforth refer to Iran, North Korea, and Libya as “states of concern.”119 Richard Haass, a prominent Republican realist, applauded Albright’s new lexicon, arguing that the term “rogue” served only to limit policy options.120 While American analysts navel-gazed, however, the Iranian press ridiculed the debate over terminology.121
Europe Takes the Lead
America was not alone in its dance with Khomeini. The European relationship with Iran was centuries longer and would grow to become just as traumatic. Still, Europe was not the United States. While the Carter administration debated whether to engage Khomeini in the months before the shah fell, the French government was hosting the ayatollah in Neauphle-le-Château, a small suburb of Paris. The French hoped to curry favor with the opposition that was poised to take power, but soon found their hospitality won them little consideration. Khomeini’s antipathy toward the West was ideological.122 No amount of obsequiousness would sway him.
Soon after Khomeini returned to Iran, the revolutionary authorities unleashed a wave of assassinations on French soil. The revolutionary court leader, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, vowed that the murders would “continue until all these dirty pawns of the decadent regime have been purged.”123 Iranian authorities did their best to keep their word.124
Subsequent events showed just how little the French government had gained through engagement. Iranian-backed terrorists bombed the French marine barracks in Beirut and the French embassy in Kuwait in 1983, and hijacked an Air France plane the following year. A Hezbollah bombing wave in Paris killed thirteen and wounded almost 250.125 After pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon seized five French hostages, Prime Minister Jacques Chirac paid for their release.126 When the French government objected to an Iranian terrorist sheltering in Iran’s embassy in Paris, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gunboats sprayed a French-flagged vessel with gunfire,127 and Lebanese Hezbollah seized new French hostages. Chirac and President François Mitterrand responded by caving to every single Iranian demand, leading the Economist to describe the French negotiating position as “Anything else, Mr. Khomeini?”128 Even fulfilling all Khomeini’s demands was not enough. Just over a year later, Iranian assassins cut down a prominent Iranian dissident in his suburban Paris home.
Great Britain took another tack. Khomeini hated Britain deeply and infused his speeches with paranoid ravings about British malfeasance.129 For these he found a ready audience: many Iranians shared his antipathy as a result of the British humiliation of Iran during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After Khomeini came to power, revolutionary mobs set upon British property and even priests, and the Foreign Office evacuated the British embassy. Only at the end of the Iran-Iraq War did the United Kingdom again opened its embassy in Tehran. For the next several months, the two countries were content to ignore each other—until February 14, 1989, when Khomeini issued a public call for Salman Rushdie’s death in response to The Satanic Verses, a novel which, although he never read it, Khomeini pronounced blasphemous. The Iranian government demanded that Rushdie apologize if he wanted the death sentence lifted. Rushdie complied, and Iran’s leadership then declared the apology to be a confession of guilt, just as they would when Albright apologized over Mosaddeq.
The British broke diplomatic relations after Khomeini ordered Rushdie’s murder, and swore not to restore them until the Iranian regime promised not to harm the novelist. But Khatami’s charm offensive blinded the British just as it did the Americans. No sooner had Iranian officials promised to revoke the death sentence—thereby reaping British goodwill and a lifting of European sanctions—than Iranian security services reaffirmed the sentence. Hence, a day after the United Kingdom and Iran agreed to exchange ambassadors once again, Iranian state media labeled Rushdie an apostate, subject to death. Simply put, Iranian officials played British diplomats for fools.
While Tehran rebuffed American, French, and British attempts at rapprochement, Germany’s guiding principle was trade unencumbered by politics, and so German-Iranian ties thrived. By 1987, the West German share of the Iranian market was over 25 percent.130 In 1992, the German foreign minister, Klaus Kinkel, argued that the German approach might serve as a model. Rather than isolate Iran as the Clinton team aimed to do, the Europeans might instead try “critical dialogue,”131 in which Europe would correlate trade with Iranian behavior on human rights and terrorism.
In practice, the critical dialogue consisted of regular meetings, but not much else. It quickly became apparent that human rights were no more than a rhetorical concern for Germany or for Europe generally. Iranian diplomats meanwhile signaled Tehran’s belief that criticism of its actions was inappropriate.
“Critical dialogue,” as it turned out, only encouraged Iran’s rogue behavior. On September 17, 1992, soon after Germany launched its diplomatic initiative, an Iranian cell murdered four Kurdish dissidents at the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin. Although German police suspected that the Iranian intelligence minister, Ali Fallahian, had ordered the hit, German officials intervened to prevent his questioning during a subsequent trip to Germany, for fear that raising the topic would sabotage dialogue.132 Instead, German officials pretended that the Iranian hit had not occurred. They even transferred high-technology computers to the Iranian intelligence service.133
While Berlin tried to curry favor with Tehran, it could not quash its own judiciary, which proceeded with a trial of those captured fleeing the Mykonos hit. On April 10, 1997, after hearing from 176 witnesses and reading intelligence files, a German court found a captured