“Preserving All Our Options”
by digby
The article about Iran that tristero quotes below is full of interesting little tid-bits. Like this:
In a pattern that would become familiar, however, a chill quickly followed the warming in relations. Barely a week after the Tokyo meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the “Axis of Evil.” Michael Gerson, now a NEWSWEEK contributor, headed the White House speechwriting shop at the time. He says Iran and North Korea were inserted into Bush’s controversial State of the Union address in order to avoid focusing solely on Iraq. At the time, Bush was already making plans to topple Saddam Hussein, but he wasn’t ready to say so. Gerson says it was Condoleezza Rice, then national-security adviser, who told him which two countries to include along with Iraq. But the phrase also appealed to a president who felt himself thrust into a grand struggle. Senior aides say it reminded him of Ronald Reagan’s ringing denunciations of the “evil empire.”
Once again, Iran’s reformists were knocked back on their heels. “Those who were in favor of a rapprochement with the United States were marginalized,” says Adeli. “The speech somehow exonerated those who had always doubted America’s intentions.” The Khameini aide concurs: “The Axis of Evil speech did not surprise the Supreme Leader. He never trusted the Americans.”
Ok. Let’s just unpack that bit. Bush didn’t want the world to know that he’d made up his mind to invade Iraq for no good reason, so his speech writers threw Iran and North Korea into the State of the Union address as the “Axis of Evil.” And Lil’ Junior thought it was like totally awesome because it sounded like Uncle Ronnie’s speech about the evil empire.
Many of us knew this at the time. I certainly rolled my eyes when I heard the phrase, recognizing both the absurdity of lumping these disparate nations together under the banner of “evil” (which was something out of a cheap horror movie) but I also knew that they were consciously evoking Reagan as a cheap political ploy. In fact, the whole “evil” rhetoric was Gerson’s patented fundamentalist dogwhistle nonsense designed to stoke the Christian Right base, a gargantuanly stupid thing to do when dealing with religious fanatics who are themselves using religion as a recruiting tool. But hey, they had an election to win.
So, it is not surprising that Iran was unnerved by Bush’s Christianist flag waving. Nonetheless, they came back to the US again:
It would be another war that nudged the two countries together again. At the beginning of 2003, as the Pentagon readied for battle against Iraq, the Americans wanted Tehran’s help in case a flood of refugees headed for the border, or if U.S. pilots were downed inside Iran. After U.S. tanks thundered into Baghdad, those worries eased. “We had the strong hand at that point,” recalls Colin Powell, who was secretary of State at the time. If anything, though, America’s lightning campaign made the Iranians even more eager to deal. Low-level meetings between the two sides had continued even after the Axis of Evil speech. At one of them that spring, Zarif raised the question of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a rabidly anti-Iranian militant group based in Iraq. Iran had detained a number of senior Qaeda operatives after 9/11. Zarif floated the possibility of “reciprocity”—your terrorists for ours.
The idea was brought up at a mid-May meeting between Bush and his chief advisers in the wood-paneled Situation Room in the White House basement. Riding high, Bush seemed to like the idea of a swap, says a participant who asked to remain anonymous because the meeting was classified. Some in the room argued that designating the militants as terrorists had been a mistake, others that they might prove useful against Iran someday. Powell opposed the handover for a different reason: he worried that the captives might be tortured. The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about “preserving all our options.” (Cheney declined to comment.) The MEK’s status remains unresolved.
Around this time what struck some in the U.S. government as an even more dramatic offer arrived in Washington—a faxed two-page proposal for comprehensive bilateral talks. To the NSC’s Mann, among others, the Iranians seemed willing to discuss, at least, cracking down on Hizbullah and Hamas (or turning them into peaceful political organizations) and “full transparency” on Iran’s nuclear program. In return, the Iranian “aims” in the document called for a “halt in U.S. hostile behavior and rectification of the status of Iran in the U.S. and abolishing sanctions,” as well as pursuit of the MEK.
An Iranian diplomat admits to NEWSWEEK that he had a hand in preparing the proposal, but denies that he was its original author. Asking not to be named because the topic is politically sensitive, he says he got the rough draft from an intermediary with connections at the White House and the State Department. He suggested some relatively minor revisions in ballpoint pen and dispatched the working draft to Tehran, where it was shown to only the top ranks of the regime. “We didn’t want to have an ‘Irangate 2’,” the diplomat says, referring to the secret negotiations to trade weapons for hostages that ended in scandal during Reagan’s administration. After Iran’s National Security Council approved the document (under orders from Khameini), a final copy was produced and sent to Washington, according to the diplomat.
The letter received a mixed reception. Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage were suspicious. Armitage says he thinks the letter represented creative diplomacy by the Swiss ambassador, Tim Guldimann, who was serving as a go-between. “We couldn’t determine what [in the proposal] was the Iranians’ and what was the Swiss ambassador’s,” he says. He added that his impression at the time was that the Iranians “were trying to put too much on the table.” Quizzed about the letter in front of Congress last week, Rice denied ever seeing it. “I don’t care if it originally came from Mars,” Mann says now. “If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important as the two-page document” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971, indicating Mao Zedong’s interest in opening China.
A few days later bombs tore through three housing complexes in Saudi Arabia and killed 29 people, including seven Americans. Furious administration hard-liners blamed Tehran. Citing telephone intercepts, they claimed the bombings had been ordered by Saif al-Adel, a senior Qaeda leader supposedly imprisoned in Iran. “There’s no question but that there have been and are today senior Al Qaeda leaders in Iran, and they are busy,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld growled. Although there was no evidence the Iranian government knew of Adel’s activities, his presence in the country was enough to undermine those who wanted to reach out.
Powell, for one, thinks Bush simply wasn’t prepared to deal with a regime he thought should not be in power. As secretary of State he met fierce resistance to any diplomatic overtures to Iran and its ally Syria. “My position in the remaining year and a half was that we ought to find ways to restart talks with Iran,” he says of the end of his term. “But there was a reluctance on the part of the president to do that.” The former secretary of State angrily rejects the administration’s characterization of efforts by him and his top aides to deal with Tehran and Damascus as failures. “I don’t like the administration saying, ‘Powell went, Armitage went … and [they] got nothing.’ We got plenty,” he says. “You can’t negotiate when you tell the other side, ‘Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start’.”
I think the key here is this:
The vice president, silent through most of the meeting as was his wont, muttered something about “preserving all our options.”
It’s pretty clear what those options were. It wasn’t a secret even then, no matter how unbelievable it may seem that they would even attempt it:
November 20, 2001
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by Eliot Cohen advocating the overthrow of the mullahs in Iran. Cohen writes: “First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the US should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the US government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden.” [Wall Street Journal, 11/20/2001]
Soon the groundwork was being laid:
February 8, 2002
Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer meets with US Vice President Dick Cheney and tells him that Israel is concerned that Iran, which Israel believes will have nuclear weapons by 2005, represents a greater threat to Israel than Iraq. “The danger, as I see it, is from a Hezbollah-Iran-Palestinian triangle, with Iran leading this triangle and putting together a coalition of terror,” he tells Cheney. [Ha’aretz, 2/9/2002]
August 9, 2003
Newsday reports that according to a senior official and another source within the Bush administration, the “ultimate objective” of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and “a group of neo-conservative civilians inside the Pentagon is change of government in Iran.” The report says that the “immediate objective appeared to be to ‘antagonize Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them.’” It apparently is no secret within the administration, as Secretary of State Colin Powell has recently complained directly to the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, about Feith’s activities. [Newsday, 8/9/2003]
January 2005
The US Air Force begins flying sorties over Iran from its bases in Afghanistan and Iraq in order to lure Tehran into turning on air defense radars so the US can develop “an electronic order of battle for Iran.” “We have to know which targets to attack and how to attack them,” an unnamed administration official tells United Press International. [United Press International, 1/26/2005 Sources: Unnamed Bush administration officials] Washington initially denies the overflight reports. [Guardian, 1/29/2005]
January 2005
A Farsi-speaking former CIA officer says he was approached by neoconservatives in the Pentagon who asked him to go to Iran and oversee “MEK [Mujahedeen-e Khalq] cross-border operations” into Iran, which he refused to do. Commenting on the neoconservatives’ ambitions in Iran, the former officer says, “They are bringing a lot of the old war-horses from the Reagan and Iran-contra days into a sort of kitchen cabinet outside the government to write up policy papers on Iran.” He says their plans for Iran are “delusional.” “They think in Iran you can just go in and hit the facilities and destabilize the government. They believe they can get rid of a few crazy mullahs and bring in the young guys who like Gap jeans, all the world’s problems are solved,” he says. [Guardian, 1/18/2005]
And the beat goes on. Today we are looking at a concerted PR campaign to implicate Iran in the Iraq war, a third carrier group is steaming to the Gulf and nobody believes a thing the US Government says.
And we watch as our democratic institutions seem to be incapable of hitting the brakes and I’m not sure I understand why. It was one thing after 9/11 for everyone to be caught up in the emotion of the moment. There is no such excuse now. The entire world knows now that the US is not only irrational but it is widely perceived as being incompetent. What could be more dangerous than having delusional megalomaniacs playing RISK at a time like this?
Here’s an example of what the administration is listening to now:
The opponents of military strikes against the mullahs’ weapons facilities say there are no guarantees that we can permanently destroy their weapons production. This is true. We can’t guarantee the results. But what we can do is demonstrate, to the mullahs and to others elsewhere, that even with these uncertainties, in a post-9/11 world the United States has red lines that will compel it to act. And one nonnegotiable red line is that we will not sit idly and watch a virulently anti-American terrorist-supporting rogue state obtain nukes. We will not be intimidated by threats of terrorism, oil-price spikes, or hostile world opinion. If the ruling clerical elite wants a head-on collision with a determined superpower, then that’s their choice.
Stirring words, I’m sure, to an embattled president whose codpiece is becoming more and more superfluous and to an unaccountable vice president with a messianic sense of mission. (That is exactly the schoolyard “strategic vision” he lives by.)
Apparently the clear history of the last six years isn’t enough for our media, though. They are still prey to administration propaganda:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisted again Friday that, despite persistent reports to the contrary circulating in Washington and around the world, the United States is not planning military action against Iran.
“I don’t know how many times the president, Secretary Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran,” an exasperated Gates told reporters at a NATO meeting in Spain. In fact, he said, the administration has consciously tried to “tone down” its rhetoric on the subject.
Similar statements in recent weeks by President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and others follow a high-level policy assessment in January that U.S. and multilateral pressure on Tehran, to the surprise of many in the administration, might be showing signs of progress.
Officials highlighted growing internal public and political criticism of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the reemergence, after months of public silence, of Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani. Larijani arrived in Munich yesterday for talks with European Union officials.
As a result, new talking points distributed to senior policymakers in the administration directed them to actively play down any suggestion of war planning.
Well now, I sure feel better don’t you?
I can’t help but wonder, however, why this wasn’t the lede instead of being buried nine paragraphs in:
Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 “the year of Iran” and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility. Hannah declined to be interviewed for this article.
As the Libby trial unfolds we see once again a picture of an extremely powerful Vice President who believes he can do anything.He does not even believe he answers to the president. Considering recent history, it is far more significant that John Hannah is telling people that an attack was a real possibility than it is that Condi’s sadly irrelevant State Department is trying to tamp down the rhetoric in public. Everything we have seen for the last six years shows that in these administration battles Cheney always wins. Watch what they do not what they say. They lie as easily as they breathe.
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