Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
did in North Korea.”157 Biden lacked the perspective to understand that engagement with North Korea had failed.
Tehran had already closed its door to such overtures. Iranian parliamentarians ruled out engagement until Congress first dropped all sanctions.158 “We shall put in his place anyone who would try . . . to extend the hand of friendship to the most blood-thirsty enemy of this land,” a Kayhan editorial declared.159
Both Democrats and Republicans sought to transform the 9/11 tragedy into an opportunity to renew diplomacy. When Bush decided to oust the Taliban regime, a mutual enemy to the United States and Iran, Tehran agreed to assist. Iranian diplomats worked closely with their American counterparts to form the new Afghan government during the 2001 Bonn Conference. Some American diplomats hailed this as a sign that Tehran had changed course.160 More likely, Tehran aimed to extend its influence throughout all of Afghanistan.
Proponents of engagement accepted Iranian altruism on faith and criticized the White House for not sharing their own goodwill. James Dobbins, a U.S. diplomat serving in Afghanistan, blasted the White House for turning down Iran’s offer to help train Afghan security forces. Dobbins simply could not conceive the insincerity of Iranian diplomats with whom he had established friendly rapport.161 Like the proverbial blind man describing an elephant, the diplomat did not see the whole picture. Dobbins counseled cooperation even as Tehran dispatched an officer of the Qods Force, an elite Revolutionary Guards unit specializing in the export of revolution, to be its consul in Herat.162
Rather than bolster Afghanistan’s central government, the Iranian regime worked to weaken it.163 Tehran sent operatives under the cover of schoolteachers and aid workers. In March 2002, Afghan commanders intercepted twelve Iranian agents organizing armed insurrection.164 Tehran also facilitated the escape of al-Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan.165 The Iranian government was glad to reap the benefits of conference participation, but its actions were diametrically opposed to its commitments.
Within the Bush administration, the top Middle East aides, Zalmay Khalilzad and William Burns, favored engagement and, like Biden, suggested that diplomats might sit down with reformists even if hardliners were recalcitrant.166 Both replicated the mistakes of their predecessors by conflating rhetoric with sincerity. Most Iranians had already given up on Khatami, but the president—like Mikhail Gorbachev in the waning days of the Soviet Union—retained the admiration of diplomats even as his domestic popularity hemorrhaged.
Placing a bet on the reformers was never wise. While women and students may have wanted serious change in Iranian society, reformists like Khatami were in fact wedded to the system. As Laura Secor observed in the New Yorker, “Iran’s reform movement, for all its courage, was the loyal opposition in a fascist state. It sought not to dismantle or secularize the Islamic Republic . . . but to improve it.”167
Within the White House, a new strategy took shape. Rather than rely on official talks, the administration would reach out to the Iranian people.168 Simultaneously, Bush would criticize the regime. This strategy reached its peak on January 29, 2002, when Bush, during his State of the Union address, placed Iran along with Iraq, North Korea, and their “terrorist allies” in an “axis of evil.” He explained, “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.”169
Bush described Iran as he saw it and refused to paper over its behavior to facilitate talks. Former officials chided him for having a diplomatic tin ear. In doing so, they played into Iranian hands, as the regime seized upon American criticisms of Bush to deflect responsibility from their own nuclear research and terror sponsorship.170 Bush merely shrugged off the diplomats’ objections. After revelations surfaced about Iran’s secret enrichment program, he quipped, “all of the sudden, there weren’t so many complaints about including Iran in the axis of evil.”171
While the Western press criticized Bush for alleged hostility toward diplomacy with Iran, the opposite was actually true. In fact, the United States sought secret talks with Iran as war with Iraq became imminent.172 The Supreme Leader forced Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Sadegh Kharazi, to resign after secret talks in Cyprus were revealed.173 It is unlikely that Kharazi had gone rogue, as the Iranian press suggested.174 The excuse, however, would enable the Iranian regime to walk away after determining what was in the American hand and then pocketing the proffered concessions. In its enthusiasm to engage, the Bush team had replicated Carter’s mistakes.
Meanwhile, the State Department objected to White House efforts to emphasize outreach to the Iranian people over direct diplomacy. Secretary Colin Powell argued that Khatami’s election had bestowed democratic credentials upon Iran,175 a point his deputy Richard Armitage reinforced. “I would note there’s one dramatic difference between Iran and the other two axes of evil, and that would be its democracy,” Armitage said.176
Unable to win White House blessing for a strategy that would legitimize the regime, proponents of normalizing relations between Washington and Tehran heaped opprobrium upon those who urged caution.177 Some opponents of the White House strategy alleged that Bush, arrogant against the backdrop of the Iraq War, rejected an Iranian grand bargain in 2003 to settle everything from terror sponsorship to nuclear ambitions. The offer was a fraud, crafted by a Swiss ambassador frustrated at the U.S.-Iran stalemate, and was privately dismissed as nonsense by Iranian officials.178 Advocates of diplomacy, however, took the bait.179 John Limbert, a former hostage and author of a book about how to negotiate with Iran, embraced the fake memo to argue that the United States and Iran were equally insincere.180 Few mentioned the fact that Bush made his own offer the following year.181
In truth, when the Swiss ambassador presented the fraudulent offer to Washington, American and Iranian officials were already at the table. As the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, met his Iranian counterpart in Paris, Khalilzad sat down in Geneva with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s UN ambassador.
Not all talks build confidence; sometimes they do the opposite. American officials quickly learned that Iran would not honor its agreements. Iranian diplomats, for example, promised noninterference in Iraq, yet the Revolutionary Guards smuggled money, men, and weapons into Iraq.182 After the Iranian foreign ministry publicized a U.S. request for cooperation in Iraq, an Iranian newspaper asserted that Iran “can make this country [Iraq] a devouring swamp for the States in the region” and suggested that American outreach proved Iranian strength. “They have been obliged to accept the reality that Iran is one of the undeniable powers, and a country which has an important role in the political calculations of the region.”183
That was strike one for diplomacy’s advocates. Strike two was Iran’s accelerating nuclear program. While diplomats counseled lifting sanctions to ease diplomacy, Iran designed a facility to house 50,000 centrifuges and hid from the IAEA a ton of uranium hexafluoride imported from China.184 What Tehran had done with the uranium it processed, it refused to say.
Strike three was Iran’s bad faith on terrorism. In the wake of 9/11, the Islamic Republic protected and assisted several hundred al-Qaeda operatives, even as it sought credit for turning over low-level functionaries.185 Tehran suggested a trade of al-Qaeda operatives for Mujahedin al-Khalq members in Iraq, but the latter, as persons protected by the Geneva Convention, were not America’s to trade. The Bush administration informed Iran that the White House would hold it responsible for any terrorism planned by al-Qaeda on Iranian soil.
Even for diplomacy’s cheerleaders, evidence of the regime’s insincerity was too obvious to miss. Either the reformers were treating their American counterparts as useful idiots, or the reformers did not have enough power to commit the regime to agreements. It was not in the State Department’s nature to consider the first possibility, but it could not ignore the second. In a July 2003 radio interview, Powell admitted, “The best thing we can do right now is not get in the middle of this family fight too deeply.”186 The Bush team had repeated the mistakes of the Carter and Reagan administrations, but it had not yet learned the lesson.
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