Neoconservatism
Diplomacy: my way or the highway?
Some indication of what their future council might hold may be found in the neoconservative diplomatic attitude toward Iran. Please keep in mind, however, that this is just short, broad-brush stroke article, so I don’t want anyone to stereotype the following because I offer only the one illustration of it, and a Reader’s Digest version at that, but it was hugely disturbing at the time, and I find the incident, which has never been given the public attention it deserves, very revealing. And as historical moments mean everything, let’s begin there.
Between October 7, 2001 and December 7, a surprisingly small force of CIA-led U.S. and British Special Forces, U.S. Marines, and soldiers of the Northern Alliance had driven al Qaeda, the Taliban, and its leader Mullah Omar from power in Afghanistan, and the UN-led Bonn Conference had set up the Afghan Interim Authority to start the political process for forming a new national government.
Flash forward to March 20, 2003. U.S. air strikes begin over Baghdad and soon 248,000 U.S. troops, with 48,000 coalition troops, invade Iraq and within six weeks have toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime. On May 1, President Bush lands on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce “the end of major combat operations” in the Iraq war.
Highly impressed, evidently, at these two swift, major military successes, and perhaps a little nervous that it might be the next domino to fall, the Iranian government approached Washington, through the Swiss embassy, with a formal request to open up negotiations. Here was a regime that had had no embassy-level diplomatic relations with the United States since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution suddenly reaching out to negotiate with the George W. Bush administration, big time. The major issues the regime laid on the table are today unimaginable, yet they are the one most desired today by Washington.the Iranian government approached Washington, through the Swiss embassy, with a formal request to open up negotiations.
What was in the Iranian offer? In Chapter 19 of his book Treacherous Alliance, Trita Parsi, an adjunct professor at John Hopkins University SAIS (School of Advanced International Studies) and president of the National Iranian American Council, writes that the Iranians had prepared a comprehensive proposal. And most significantly, it was authoritative. According to Parsi, the proposal was drafted and known only to a closed circle of decision-makers in Tehran, and it had been approved by the highest levels of clerical and political authorities, including Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the supreme leader, who has the final say in all matters of state. Apart from Khamanei’s imprimatur, the proposal would not be taken seriously by the Bush White House.
In an Appendix to the book, Parsi includes a copy of the formal proposal, in which the Iranians called for a dialogue of “mutual respect” and listed major “points of contention” that Iran was willing to discuss with the U.S. The Americans, Parsi writes, were stunned by the proposal. Iran had declared itself willing to talk about: its nuclear program; help in stabilizing Iraq; increasing its cooperation with the U.S. on al Qaeda (Iran had assisted the U.S.in ousting the Taliban and al Qaeda from Afghanistan); ending Iranian “material support to Palestinian opposition groups” (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al.) and pressuring “these organizations to stop violent action against civilians”; leaning on Hezbollah “to become a mere political organization within Lebanon,” and accepting the Arab League’s Beirut Declaration for a two-state solution.
The proposal, of course, also spelled out what Iran would like to see on the table in return from the U.S., including: the removal of Iran from the “axis of evil,” an end of sanctions and impediments to international trade, “full access to peaceful nuclear technology,” recognition of “Iran’s legitimate security interests in the region,” and U.S. help against anti-Iranian terrorists. The proposal closed by suggesting mutual next steps, including public statements, the establishment of parallel working groups, and hammering out a timetable for implementation. It was unprecedented. And it was rejected.
After its stunning successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush White House by the spring of 2003 found itself breathing the diplomatic air most envied (and unobtainable) by world capitals: extraordinary heights of negotiating power with capitals of the Muslim Middle East. Tehran had taken a huge risk in reaching out. It now hoped, and awaited a response. It got none. Instead, the Swiss Embassy got a slap on the wrist for daring to interfere.
It was a blown historical moment. Not only would the U.S. be able to enter the talks that could start defusing these long-standing bilateral adversarial relations, it would do so in a position with huge diplomatic strength. Further, the regional situation hadn’t looked so hopeful for decades. There was no perfect storm in Iraq. The initial military success had not yet given way to the al Qaeda insurgency or the brutal sectarian violence between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq. The radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was still mayor of Tehran and not president of Iran. The regime’s hardline ruling clerics had not yet disqualified 2,000 moderate and reformed-minded political candidates from running in Iran’s 2004 parliamentary elections. The so-called border in southern Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah had not occurred. The world’s cliff-hanging worries over Iran’s nuclear aims were still distant. The Shiite militias in Iraq were not yet being re-supplied by Iranian sources. And so on.
As with all diplomatic proposals, of course, this one was but a starting point, the beginning of the international game of getting to Yes. The proposal, as both sides knew, was not set in stone. Many issues in it would hit the cutting room floor on the way to an agreement, if ever there were an agreement, but now it was the recipient’s move.“ Finally it was all paying off,” write journalists Lou Dubose and Bernstein. “One of the countries that Bush had placed in the Axis of Evil was coming out of the cold.” (Dubose and Bernstein, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, 2006, p. 186.)
It would be an exceptional move indeed if at this point in this particular case the recipient did not engage with the sender, perhaps by paring down or eliminating two or three issues in a letter of response while emphasizing one or two others it was willing to start talks about. The other party would then reply to such modifications, and so on. If the parties kept at it, they may forge solid linkages one or two issues, and if an appropriate framework were found whereby the parties could sit down to work on a mutually beneficial agreement surrounding those issues, then formal talks could begin. Further, it would not be unusual if the issues that made it through to Yes became, over time, ground for increased trust between the parties eventually leading to talks about remaining issues. And this was sorely need between these two parties.The Bush administration, however, refused to reciprocate. The Iranian proposal was not even tested.
In fact, the Iranian proposal seems to have been sent in such a spirit. These words are tucked into the middle of it: “We have always been ready for direct and authoritative talks with the US/with Iran in good faith and with the aim of discussing – in mutual respect – our common interests and our mutual concerns based on merits and objective realities….” (Parsi, Alliance, Appendix.) The Bush administration, however, refused to reciprocate. The Iranian proposal was not even tested. “An opportunity for a major breakthrough had been willfully wasted,” Parsi concluded. (Parsi, Alliance, p.249). Larry Wilkerson, Secretary of State Powell’s chief of staff at the time, believes the mistake was huge. According to BBC News security correspondent Gordon Corera, Wilkerson afterward said, “In my mind, it was one of those things” about which you say “I can’t believe we did this,” especially at a time when Iranian vulnerability was at its greatest and Washington at its most triumphalist.
It would be understatement in the extreme to call this a missed opportunity. Parsi writes that American nonresponse was perceived in Tehran as an insult, noting that Iran began “complaining about the difficulty of dealing with an ideological” White House. “Washington’s handling of the Iranian proposal,” Parsi concludes, “strengthened Iran’s belief that dealing with the United States from a position of weakness would not work.” (Ibid., pp. 255, 256.)
The radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not yet president of Iran, Iran’s tactical help in Afghanistan had been paying off, the Powell State Department had been pushing for a strategic opening with Iran, and the moderates were still strong and wanted to deal. According to diplomatic correspondent Barbara Slavin in Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage (Powell’s deputy), and Larry Wilkerson had been trying to build a proactive policy toward Iran, but they faced continual “ferocious opposition” from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense). (Slavin, Bitter Friends, 2007, p.196.)
Parsi writes (p. 248) that Powell, Armitage, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice went to the President with the Iranian proposal, “but instead of instigating a lively debate of the details of the American response, Cheney and Rumsfeld quickly put the matter to an end.” They argued in favor of not responding. The President agreed. So “we told them no,” Wilkerson said in an interview at George Washington University, and “we wrote a letter of protest to the Swiss for interfering in our foreign policy” (Dubose and Bernstein, Vice, p. 186.) The steely neoconservative mindset in the Bush administration toward U.S. adversaries prevailed: why talk when you can demand?
President Bush’s Vice-President and Secretary of Defense reveal an a collective attitude that can prevail at the highest levels of a national government, and at great a cost, for in the ensuing years of Iranian ultra-hardline foreign policy, the regime has become an even more unreachable adversary of the United States. With the exception of Israel, neoconservative diplomacy is very hard-lined toward most Middle East states, in that it seems quite happy at times, such as with Iran, to set unrealistic preconditions that must be met before any talks with the U.S. may occur.
A neoconservative response to entering high-level talks with Iran might be to say that such talks are not in the interests of the U.S. But just the opposite can be equally argued. When at the highest levels of U.S. government an entrenched attitude exists that precludes talking to Iran, how does that serve U.S. national interests, especially when the security and prosperity to the Middle East are important to those interests? It seems wise to open up direct talks with Iran, Syria too, without setting preconditions for such talks. The history is that was after Cheney-Rumsfeld snub of Iran, after there was no hope of reciprocation from Washington, that Tehran’s relations with Washington seriously worsened.
As neoconservative policy sought to tighten the noose, the Iranian regime fought back. Ultra-hardline clerics gained power over the moderates, reformed-minded political candidates were quashed, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president, Hezbollah was green-lighted to incite Israel, the nuclear program was refueled, and so on. This is not to suggest cause and effect. Not in the least. It is only to suggest what might have been the wisdom in talking to an adversary who seemed willing to hold high-level talks. For it is not with one’s friends and allies that one needs to make peace; and one cannot make peace with an adversary without talking.
Militarism, the hallmark
Although not even neoconservatives themselves can predict what their future council might hold, I believe it is militarism that remains key to understanding the driving force of its conceptual picture, and that may proved clues to future policy proposal. Neoconservatives seem never to have lost their original militarism from the 1960s, as is implied, clearly implied, in FPI’s Mission Statement, which can be read on the Web. Once aimed at Soviet expansionism, but held in check for decades by containment prudence, and for all the problems that followed the invasion of Iraq, neoconservative militarism is today leading the charge, quite unembarrassedly leading, to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Neoconservatives – and this is their legacy to date – are implicated in placing the United States on a war footing in the Middle East from which the nation will not easily free itself, as the Obama administration has discovered. Although political realism emerged to inform U.S. Middle East policy in the closing years of Bush’s tenure, and though President Obama favors a liberal internationalist agenda influenced by multilateral realism, the formidable internal logic of neoconservative militarism remains influential in Washington’s Middle East policy. Because of this, the world remains never more than one international incident between Iran and America away from seeing it triggered, again.
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