by Hooman Majd
Every Iranian leader has articulated détente under the umbrella of mutual respect, from liberal reformers to some hard-line conservatives, and the leadership has always recognized that the Iranian people overwhelmingly want relations with the United States anyway. Firebrand President Ahmadinejad, perhaps the most hard-line and conservative of Iran’s presidents since the early days of the revolution, actually went further than any other Iranian leader in attempting an outreach to America. His letters, to both President Bush and President Obama, were evidence of that, given that even President Khatami, who perhaps most desired détente with the United States, wasn’t allowed by the Supreme Leader to extend a hand to either President Bill Clinton, who once waited outside the men’s room at the UN—after Khatami delivered a speech—for a presumably washed one, or President Bush, who pre-empted an Iranian hand by inducting Khatami’s government into the “axis of evil.”
It was under former president Khatami that Iran had made the greatest effort to bridge its gap in relations with the United States, an effort spearheaded by Khatami himself but often undermined by hard-liners “on both sides,” as he once said to me. Iranian politics has always, perhaps counterintuitively, favored Republican administrations over Democratic ones, stretching all the way back to the early days of the Shah’s rule. It was a Republican administration (Eisenhower) that restored the Shah to his throne in 1953 after a Democratic one (Truman) refused British entreaties to stage a coup to remove the troublesome Mossadeq. Moreover, the Shah worried about Democratic presidents, who had, in his mind, a more emotional stance on the issue of human rights in its client states and allies. President Kennedy, although publicly a supporter of the Shah, also pressured him on human rights (and on implementing his “White Revolution,” a plan to reform a still somewhat feudal Iran), but Lyndon Johnson, consumed as he was by the Vietnam War, was simply happy to have an Iran that could be reliably trusted to be in the “American camp.”
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, eager to overlook any human rights abuses by America’s friends, perhaps did more for the Shah than any other administration, arming him to the teeth and granting him great latitude in raising oil prices, which in turn allowed him to proudly and vaingloriously build the fourth largest army in the world. President Ford merely continued Nixon’s policy, but Jimmy Carter, who made human rights central to his campaign for the presidency, rang alarm bells in Tehran when he won the election in 1976. It was left to Ardeshir Zahedi, Iran’s urbane ambassador to Washington and the Shah’s once son-in-law, to ensure that the Carter administration didn’t lose sight of the fact that Iran was America’s closest ally in the region after Israel (with which Iran also had diplomatic and even good relations), and to downplay to the extent that he could any discussions of SAVAK, political prisoners, or human rights in general. But Jimmy Carter nonetheless pressed the Shah on human rights, particularly on the issue of political prisoners and SAVAK, despite his praise for him (and his famous declaration that Iran was an “island of stability,” just as a revolution was taking form on New Year’s Eve 1978). The Shah obliged to some extent, leading many Iranian supporters of his to declare, to this day, that the Islamic Revolution was Carter’s fault if not his actual plan (along with the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua).
One might be forgiven for thinking that the Islamic revolutionary government that took over from the Shah’s would feel somewhat indebted to Carter and fear no threat from him, but that was not the case. Quite the opposite, for although it recognized that Carter’s pressing of the human rights issue weakened the Shah, it didn’t trust the Democrats, who it saw, paradoxically as the Shah did, as members of a party that vacillated too often when it came to foreign relations. (And the fact that the revolution was about to embark on a killing spree, eliminating not just high-ranking members of the ancien régime but any political opposition to it, may have had something to do with the Islamic revolutionaries’ concern with an American administration known to speak up on human rights.) With Republicans, Iranian politicians have always felt, they know where they stand and can adjust their policies accordingly, whereas with Democrats they have always felt unsure of how an administration might react to them and their policies, foreign and domestic. When Democrats are in power, the reasoning goes, U.S. support for or opposition to undemocratic regimes might change on a whim. President Obama’s dilemma in formulating an Iran policy, and Iran’s dilemma in how to deal with a Democratic administration, particularly after the June 2009 election and its bloody aftermath, were only compounded by Iran’s suspicion of Democrats, although the new U.S. administration may have been less than aware of prevailing Iranian attitudes and long-standing paranoia toward the Democratic party.
Whether or not one chooses to believe the conspiracy theories surrounding the hostage crisis, a failed 1980 “October Surprise,” or a Reagan November counter-surprise, there can be no doubt that Khomeini’s government took full advantage of Ronald Reagan’s defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980 (helped as it was by the continuing hostage crisis). First, there were the Iran-Contra arms deals and then Reagan’s subsequent emphasis on Afghanistan rather than Iran, even after Iranian client Hezbollah blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing more than two hundred American soldiers. Reagan was preoccupied with his own “Evil Empire,” and Iran with its war with Iraq, but the Reagan and George H. W. Bush years were marked less by outright hostility (albeit with the occasional flare-up, such as the 1998 incident where an IranAir passenger jet was shot down in the Persian Gulf by a navy ship, the USS Vincennes; the navy declared it an accident but Iranians considered it a deliberate act) than by a general disinterest in Iran by the U.S. administrations. It was under President Clinton that Iran once again became a prominent (if not center-stage) foreign policy issue when the new Democratic president revived publicly the U.S. policy of regime change in Iran, although admittedly in a somewhat halfhearted fashion; but Iran took careful notice.
Western interest in Iran, beyond unenthusiastic regime-change notions, grew dramatically after the election of Mohammad Khatami as its first reform president. The Clinton administration, looking for ways to jump-start a potential thaw in relations with its adversary, went as far as effectively apologizing for U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup (in a speech by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), an apology and recognition that Iran had always demanded, but subsequently Bill Clinton referred to the Iranian leadership as “unelected,” a word that gives the Iranian leadership an allergic reaction. Khatami, who had prevailed on the Supreme Leader to allow him latitude in exploring re-establishment of ties with what he saw as a willing U.S. administration, was effectively thwarted by one word, and distrust of the Democratic American administration and its intentions only intensified in Tehran.
The election of George W. Bush to the U.S. presidency, partly on a campaign promise to reduce American adventurism abroad, was greeted by the Iranian leadership with a shrug. They did think, however, that Republicans might be more inclined to deal with an “unelected” leader, and so Khatami was permitted to continue his efforts to bring about a slow thaw, if nothing else, in relations with the United States. The 9/11 tragedy was, as far as Iran was concerned, a perfect opportunity to move more quickly toward a rapprochement, something that Iran craved at the time. Khatami was the first Muslim leader to condemn the act, and the first to send his condolences to America, acts the Supreme Leader supported. Furthermore, Iranian authorities, usually quick to organize anti-American rallies with a seemingly unlimited supply of quick-burning American flags, allowed candlelight vigils, without flags, in Tehran for the victims of the terrorist attacks. That Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks was helpful, given that Iran considered it an enemy as much as the West did, and that Afghanistan was soon to become the target of American wrath was almost a godsend, for other than Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, Iran loathed no other political group or party in the world more than the Taliban. Iran had been supporting the Northern Alliance in its war against the Taliban f
or years, had hosted some four million Afghan refugees in its territory, and had almost gone to war with Afghanistan in 1998. The Taliban had killed nine of Iran’s diplomats then at its consulate in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, an act of war as far as Iran was concerned. Cooler heads, including Khatami’s and Khamenei’s, ultimately prevailed but not until Iran amassed its troops on the border, ready to strike. The decision to not enter the “graveyard of empires” was a wise one in hindsight, for three years later America conveniently vanquished the foe on Iran’s eastern border.
In 2001, though, Iran made it a policy to overtly support the American war against Afghanistan once it became apparent that the United States was intent on driving out the Taliban, to be replaced by Iran’s allies, the Northern Alliance. There were practical considerations, not least of which was that Iranian assistance would, in the mind of Khatami and his administration, be rewarded by a Republican administration that might be receptive to restoring relations on a pragmatic basis, if nothing else. After 9/11 Bush proclaimed, “You’re either with us, or with the terrorists.” Iran was clearly “with us” on this one, even though it resented Bush’s formulation of an either/or world. Early indications were that the U.S. administration appreciated Iran’s offers to help in the war against the Taliban (and later on was very helpful, some in the Bush administration even say indispensable, in the attempts to form a new government in Afghanistan under Hamid Karzai).
President Khatami believed he was in a strong position in early January 2002, and his strategy of limited engagement seemed to be paying off. The seesawing Clinton days were over; a decisive Republican administration had taken over and had so far shown a willingness to deal with an adversary with shared interests. Even the hard-liners in Tehran were unable to persuade the Supreme Leader that Khatami, their bête noir, was weakening Iran, or worse, the revolution and its ideals, by collaborating with the United States. No one was under any illusion that U.S.-Iran ties would normalize immediately, and hard-liners thought that they could derail things at any time. But for the moment, Khatami and his reformist allies were in control and had the Supreme Leader’s backing for baby steps along a path to détente. Until, that is, George Bush’s State of the Union address at the end of the month, when for some inexplicable reason (other than an alleged intention to someday march on Tehran), he placed Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, in an “axis of evil” and condemned it as an enemy to be confronted by the United States (this just after ousting the Taliban of Afghanistan, who would have undoubtedly been included in said axis had they survived the initial American onslaught). And, as if to pour salt on the wound, he resurrected Clinton’s “unelected leaders” terminology. On that day, Khatami told me later, he knew he was dead—dead as in unable to alter the trajectory of U.S.-Iranian relations, and dead as in his reformist ideals and plans were sure to be crushed by the opposition, which had been waiting for such a moment to declare any deals with the United States as fraught with deception and double-dealing, and anathema to the Islamic Republic.
Beyond U.S.-Iranian relations, though, all ideas of reform were tarred with the same feathers. Now, the prevailing attitude was that any reform would weaken Iran. Khatami’s credibility with conservatives sank to a new low. Hard-liners in Tehran rejoiced, for Bush had proved their point that America was an untrustworthy, hegemonic beast. Hard-liners (or neo-conservatives) rejoiced in Washington too, but the reform movement in Iran and all who had championed a new era in Iranian foreign policy, particularly as it applied to the United States, took a blow from which it was going to be hard, if not impossible, to recover. Khatami was deterred but he pressed on, and he and his top aides were successful in persuading Ayatollah Khamenei to try one more approach with the Republican administration, one that in 2003 appeared to be readying itself to remove Iran’s other arch-foe, Saddam Hussein.
Iran had a number of back-channel communication lines open with the Bush administration, one of which was through Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s popular ambassador to the United Nations. Zarif had been instrumental in working with the U.S. administration on its Afghanistan efforts, and he never neglected to pay a visit to the Supreme Leader’s office as well as to the president on his almost monthly trips back to Tehran. But it was there in Tehran, through the Swiss ambassador to Iran (who represented U.S. interests in the absence of diplomatic relations), that Khatami’s administration decided to directly approach the White House, with an offer to meet and negotiate all areas of concern, including Iran’s support for groups such as Hezbollah and its opposition to Israel as well as its nuclear program.
Sadeq Kharrazi, who was Iran’s ambassador to Paris at the time and a nephew of Kamal Kharrazi, the foreign minister, was the main author of the now-infamous “letter to the Bush administration.” The Swiss ambassador to Iran delivered the letter to U.S. officials, but the U.S. president ignored it and the White House rejected his conveying of the message as “interference” in the affairs of the United States. Some in the Bush administration even considered the letter a forgery, arguing that lacking a letterhead, the faxed document could not have been issued by the Iranian government, thus implying that the Swiss ambassador, extraordinary and plenipotentiary as his diplomatic title went, was also an extraordinary patsy.
Kharrazi was also a close advisor to Khatami (and remains so today), but as a relative by marriage (his sister is married to one of Khamenei’s sons) he had the ear of the Supreme Leader, and his championing of yet another outreach to an American administration was crucial in thwarting any hard-line opposition to it. Any doubts as to the veracity of his communication could have been removed with a simple phone call, but back then the United States didn’t “talk to evil.” The letter, naturally, went unacknowledged and unanswered, and once again, as the United States began to deal with a post-Saddam Iraq, it wasn’t just the United States (that might have benefited greatly from Iran’s influence, and indeed help, in Iraq) that lost an opportunity, but also Khatami and the reformists, who were the ultimate losers for proving to the conservative opposition yet again the impossibility of dealing with America on an equal footing.
By now the Republicans had shed their reputation in Iran as the party of pragmatic deal-makers, and Bush’s re-election in 2004 and a continuation of hostile U.S. rhetoric toward the Islamic Republic—still unanswered by Khatami—was a sign to conservatives that the only way to deal with the United States was to confront it. Still, the Supreme Leader followed Khatami’s lead to a large extent, allowing him to suspend uranium enrichment in exchange for what promised to be a package of incentives from the West, including the United States, but the package wasn’t delivered until the Iranian elections of 2005. And even then it was an ambiguous offer of future considerations if Iran agreed to forgo immediately its right to produce nuclear fuel on its own territory. Many argue that the Supreme Leader was willing to go along with his government’s overtures to the United States, including sending the message to the Bush administration through the Swiss, only out of mere self-preservation—a fear that America might move against Iran militarily as it had against the Taliban and then Saddam. That is probably true to some extent in that in 2003 and 2004, Donald Rumsfeld’s boastful “democracy is messy” years, Iran was seriously considering the possibility that whoever said “real men go to Tehran,” a quote attributed to a senior U.S. official, wasn’t kidding. But by the middle of 2005 when the West finally delivered its incentives package to Iran, whatever fears Iranians had of a U.S. invasion had largely disappeared, along with U.S. credibility, in the aftermath of the “messy” democratic experiment in Mesopotamia.
Khatami was in his last days as president, and the reform candidate Mostafa Moin had lost spectacularly in the first round of the elections, but Ali Larijani, Iran’s newly appointed chief nuclear negotiator, wasted no time in denouncing the Khatami administration as having been prepared, in its eagerness to deal with the United States, to “trade away a pearl for a lollipop.” Of course Khatami would have rejecte
d the incentives package just as Ahmadinejad did, and would have restarted the enrichment program as he did, but Iranian conservatives smelled blood and rushed to denounce Khatami’s legacy as one of bending to the will of the West. This group of nations appeared to want to deal with Iran, but in fact put obstacles in Khatami’s way every time he came close to achieving a breakthrough. It was a West that wouldn’t even grant permission to Airbus to deliver a presidential aircraft to Khatami, one his administration had ordered and paid for but sat in a hanger in France because of U.S. objections to the deal, objections that were curiously removed once he was no longer president. (It is now the plane Ahmadinejad travels on for his yearly visits to New York.) The era of an open Iran—one where Jack Straw, the hapless British foreign secretary, made frequent trips to; one where even Prince Charles visited in the aftermath of the Bam earthquake of 2004 and met privately with President Khatami—seemed to be over.