Dancing with the Devil. Michael Rubin
those they will replace, but America’s senior diplomats have no such mechanism to transmit accumulated knowledge. American diplomacy is Sisyphean, as new secretaries endlessly repeat the missteps of their predecessors. If during his first term Bush had welcomed broad debate within his administration about diplomacy’s wisdom, by 2005 the debate had ended and skeptics of outreach were purged or retired. The State Department doubled down on negotiations even as the stakes skyrocketed.
Whereas Powell stumbled over whom to engage, Condoleezza Rice’s team swept such concerns aside. In order to support Europe’s diplomacy toward Iran, she added new incentives to their pot. “This is most assuredly giving the Europeans a stronger hand, not rewarding the Iranians,” she explained.187 Someone should have told that to the Iranians. They scoffed at Rice’s offer to provide them with much-needed spare parts for their civilian air fleet as well as World Trade Organization membership to entice them to the table.188
Tehran then announced it would end its moratorium on uranium enrichment. In response, rather than show Tehran that its backtracking would cost the Islamic Republic dearly, the European Union offered a deal modeled on the one that Bill Clinton offered to North Korea a decade earlier: The West would assist Iran’s peaceful nuclear program in exchange for Tehran’s commitment to cease enrichment and halt construction of its plutonium-producing heavy-water reactor.
Unfortunately for Europe, Iran replicated North Korea’s strategy: blackmail for cash and technology. Like the North Koreans, Iranian officials had learned to ignore threats, knowing that rewards were just around the corner. The IAEA, after months of foot dragging to give diplomats time to head off a crisis, found the Islamic Republic in violation of its nuclear safeguards agreement. Iran responded with defiance, breaking seals that international monitors had placed on its once-secret Natanz enrichment facility.
The Iranian gamble paid off: European diplomats offered even more incentives. The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, promised Iran “a generous package, a bold package” including nuclear technology, economic concessions, and possibly even security cooperation. In exchange, he demanded only that Iran once again halt sensitive nuclear activities.189 Again, Iran resisted.
European officials blamed America. They could not imagine that their outreach would not work.190 Diplomats were more willing to believe Iran’s manufactured grievances than consider for a moment that the regime might be insincere. European officials lobbied their American counterparts furiously, arguing that it was Bush’s intransigence, and not the assumptions underlying European diplomacy, that had caused engagement to fail.
For the State Department, revitalizing its partnership with Europe became a higher priority than holding firm on issues that caused the rift in the first place. Accordingly, it counseled surrender, at least to Europe. On May 31, 2006, Rice announced that the United States would not only talk with Tehran, but also enhance its incentive package. All she asked was that Iran suspend enrichment for the duration of talks.191 Rice insisted that she would be no pushover. Should Iran refuse, she promised severe consequences.192 In a conference call accompanying the announcement, however, her advisors could name none of those consequences. The Iranians noticed. The olive branch convinced them that America was a paper tiger.
The Iranian government responded with defiance. After months of silence, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inaugurated a facility capable of producing plutonium for weaponry in the western city of Arak. Coming less than a month after the Security Council demanded a one-month suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment, this action was deliberately provocative. The fact that Iran had spent two years building the plant while diplomats scurried to engage was even more telling.
On September 15, 2006, the European Union dropped its demand that Iran comply with IAEA and Security Council demands for enrichment suspension. Javier Solana commented, “We are really making progress: never before have we had a level of engagement, and a level of discussions . . . as we have now.” In hindsight, the Islamic Republic was increasing its centrifuge capacity from 164 to 3,000.193 For diplomats, getting Iran to the table had become the top objective, more important even than holding Iran to its commitments. Talking trumped behavior as the metric of progress.194 In Pentagon terms, this would be the equivalent of judging battle by focusing on the shooting rather than victory.
Iranian officials reverted to tactics harking back to the hostage crisis. Talks proceeded, even though Iran’s top negotiator could not confirm the Supreme Leader’s compliance with the Iranian team’s commitments.195
Not surprisingly, talks failed.196 The following spring, Ahmadinejad stood at Natanz and announced, “Our country joined the club of nuclear nations.” Two years later, the State Department’s Iran point man lamented that “Iran walked away and missed a rare opportunity to pursue a better relationship with the United States.”197 From an Iranian perspective, there was no failure. Iran’s leadership had engaged insincerely as a diversion while pressing forward in its nuclear ambitions. Finally, on November 30, 2007, its negotiator announced that Iran would take all past proposals for compromise off the table.198 Iran had refined its nuclear abilities during its engagement with the European Union and had created a new reality.
Western officials responded like a drunk who concludes from a hangover that he needs more beer: by loosening demands and adding more incentives. Germany freed Kazem Darrabi, the mastermind of the Mykonos murders.199 Rice joined other Security Council foreign ministers to offer Iran a nuclear reactor, nuclear fuel, normalization of trade, and civil aircraft upgrades.200
Rice meanwhile sought to move ahead with bilateral talks. Conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan provided ready topics, but efforts to win Iranian cooperation were costly. Rice’s outreach led Tehran to believe that America was on the ropes, so Iranian authorities not only increased their support for militias operating in Iraq, but also began to ship weaponry to the Taliban.201 In the same year that Rice offered incentives, explosively formed projectile attacks by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq increased 150 percent. Tehran clearly wanted to see if it might receive a higher reward for ending more violence.202 Diplomats deny it hurts to talk, but hundreds of American servicemen paid the price.
While journalists and diplomats celebrated Americans and Iranians sitting together openly after so many years, they missed the symbolism inherent in the choice of envoys: Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat, represented the United States, while Hassan Kazemi Qomi, a Qods Force operative, represented Tehran. For the United States, dialogue was a means to resolve conflict, but for Iran, it provided cover for the export of revolutionary goals and support of terrorism.
American diplomats saw dialogue as a breakthrough, but it was a mirage. Qomi waved off evidence and denied Iranian complicity in Iraqi militia attacks. Dialogue did far less to reduce violence than to diminish the U.S. military’s willingness to capture Iranian personnel involved in training terrorists. With almost religious zeal, proponents of dialogue denied Iranian wrongdoing, for admitting it would acknowledge the shortcomings of diplomacy and could delay talks for years.203 Ironically, Iranian analysts were less dismissive of the notion that their military was in cahoots with the Taliban. “It is better for Iran if America is entangled in Afghanistan with the Taliban,” wrote an analyst in Iran’s largest-circulation daily.204
The dialogue over Iraq may have backfired—with reverberations felt in Afghanistan as well—but diplomats refused to admit defeat. In July 2008, Rice voided her own red line of May 31, 2006, by dispatching Under Secretary William Burns to meet Iran’s nuclear negotiator even without an Iranian commitment to suspend uranium enrichment. The willingness to issue and then ignore frameworks and conditions hemorrhaged American credibility. Even with Burns present, Iran rejected any enrichment freeze.
Bush left the White House with Iran’s nuclear program far more advanced than when he took office. By any metric, he failed to resolve the challenge posed by Iran to American national interests. While proponents of engagement attribute Bush’s failures to a neglect of diplomacy, the opposite is true. Bush, like Clinton and Carter before him, would not acknowledge that rogue regimes engaged insincerely.
The Outstretched Hand
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