By Patricia H. Kushlis
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s whirlwind trip to Europe and the Middle East needed to have happened – as Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York recently observed. Rice was good. She hit an A-440, the exact pitch played by the oboe to tune a western orchestra before the concert begins. Her carefully crafted public speeches were non-controversial. Her characteristic frown was replaced with a heretofore scarcely seen attractive smile.
The Europeans reciprocated. The air badly needed clearing. The U.S. and Europe need to talk with, not shout at, each other over the next four years. For the first time, this administration – outside of Colin Powell – sounded as if it were treating its Western European counterparts with respect. George W. Bush is now following suit - publicly leaving behind the Old Europe/New Europe characterizations which the administration loudly proclaimed, exascerbated and exploited throughout its first term.
But how long this “kiss and make up” trans-Atlantic love-fest will last is an open question. Fundamental substantive differences remain the same.
The first one is Iran.
There are many people in the U.S. government who know a lot about Iran, just as many knew a lot about Iraq. Our specialists are not ignorant of the facts or of Iranian history, but is anyone in the Bush Administration listening?
Will the administration ultimately endorse the European initiatives - at least as a first step?
The Germans, British and French have tried to persuade the Iranians - through negotiations and fiscal inducements – to shelve their apparent drive for nuclear weapons. But the President’s apparent reluctance to back the European effort makes me wonder if the administration’s all sticks and no carrots approach to this complex country is all that fundamentally different from its attitude towards Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion.
For Americans, the U.S. relationship with Iran soured in 1979 during the 444-day hostage crisis when 52 American diplomats were held captive by radical Iranian students in the occupied American Embassy. They had been taken and held in complete violation of international law. What has been all but forgotten, however, is that the immediate cause of the students’ actions was the Carter Administration’s controversial decision to allow the ailing Shah – then in Egypt – into the U.S. for medical treatment.
What has also been relegated to America’s dust-bin of history is that Ronald Reagan ended the crisis and brought the hostages home through quiet, behind the scenes negotiations and not before bending to most of Iran’s demands that included financial inducements and the agreement to stay out of Iranian domestic politics through an under-the-table deal that never registered with most Americans.
Today, formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran remain nonexistent, and the Iranian Government – even moderate President Mohammad Khatami – is convinced, not without reason, that the U.S. has placed the country in the Pentagon’s bull’s eye.
President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union characterization of Iran as a part of the “Axis of Evil” set Iranians on guard. Could this have contributed to a crackdown in early 2004 on Iranian secularist reformers by the theocratic establishment just as it appeared the clerics were loosening the screws on the democratic activities of their domestic adversaries?
Contentious US-Iranian relations have a history that dates well before 1979. They go back at least as far as the U.S. and British decision to overthrow the populist Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and replace him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had earlier fled the country. The Shah, to retain control until his ouster in 1979, turned increasingly to SAVAK for support, the Iranian secret police known for their brutality.
The events surrounding that 1953 CIA-British Intelligence instigated coup are detailed in American journalist Stephen Kinzer’s best seller All the Shah’s Men published in 2003. This coup placed the Shah back on the throne but saved only a portion of Iranian oil for continued exploitation by British interests. It opened the door to Americans, French and others through an international consortium – but in the long run paved the way for the imposition of a 25 year old Shiite theocracy.
For the Eisenhower Administration, Mossadegh’s overthrow was executed in the blind light of, and in this case, short-sighted “with-us or against-us” anti-Communism that dominated U.S. foreign policy until the Soviet Union’s implosion in 1991. Fighting Communism, not nourishing secular democratic movements, was the U.S. single-minded post-WWII priority.
Mossadegh did not come to power through Iran’s first homegrown parliamentary elections. Iran’s earliest experiment with democracy began with the Constitutional Revolution in 1906. Russian and British internal meddling that divided the country into spheres of influence – the Russians in the north and the British in the south – helped defeat Iran’s initial fledgling democracy modeled on western lines.
Hence, at least twice in the last century, foreign powers – including the U.S. and the U.K. - squashed indigenous Iranian democratic reform movements in favor of more pliable dictatorships which they helped control to their advantage.
Whether anti-Communism, capitalist oil concessions, or colonial Britain’s strategic desire to keep an overland route open to India was the primary motivation: the result has been demonstrated opposition to Iranian democracy by the world’s oldest democracies themselves.
Thus the Bush Administration’s “freedom and democracy for all” rhetoric aimed at Iranians among others may well fall on skeptical Iranian ears. Over the years, Iran had, and has, experienced a succession of weak parliaments that succumbed to the wishes of Iran’s pro-western authoritarian rulers until that is – January 1979. Called the Majlis, this weak parliament continues to operate even today.
Given the ghosts of diplomatic history past, is it any wonder that Iran’s current leaders question the Administration’s motives? Or is “democracy for all” - from their viewpoint - just another excuse for the U.S. to intervene in domestic Iranian politics, destabilize the current Iranian government and weaken the country in the eyes of certain neighbors – already in possession of nuclear-weapons capable of reaching Iran? And if so, is the hard-line U.S. response to the nuclear proliferation question likely to be met with increased, not lessened, Iranian intransigence?
The European negotiating initiative may prove unsuccessful, but before the Administration dismisses it summarily, it needs to remember that although America’s historical memory is short, Iranians take a long term view of events. So perhaps it would do well to shelve the advice of the neoconservatives who are chomping at the bit for their next Middle Eastern battle and support another, less costly, quieter approach.
President Reagan, after all, gained the U.S. hostages’ release through behind-the-scenes diplomacy, not bellicose, threatened U.S. interventionism. Who knows? A similar approach today might not only quell Iran’s apparent nuclear ambitions by helping to satisfy its neighborhood security anxieties but also support the democratic reformers in the world’s only theocratic state.