UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 14 November 2008 -- Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election congratulations to Barack Obama – the first from the Islamic republic to a newly elected U.S. president since the overthrow of the Shah – hint that even Tehran’s conservatives may be ready to accept U.S. concerns as part of "an approach based on justice and respect." But our own conservatives at home are mounting a fierce campaign to foreclose any change in approach.

The president-elect needs to keep his options open.

The drive to rein in Senator Obama’s promise to redirect American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf had started even before the polls opened. Mr. Obama’s rivals for his party’s nomination had furiously challenged his refusal to set preconditions for talks with Iran and other bête noire regimes of the Bush years. They backpedaled when they discovered that an uncompromising stance had no traction with war-weary voters.

So now the effort to deflect Mr. Obama from undercutting George Bush’s policy has moved into Washington policy salons. Campaigners of both parties for a nuclear-free Iran have warned of the dangers of dialogue.

A bipartisan task force headed by two former senators, Indiana Republican Daniel Coats and Virginia Democrat Charles Robb, has perhaps drawn the most attention. With its ties to the American Enterprise Institute, the task force report bears an unmistakable neoconservative imprint, which would not normally be thought to be a pressure point on a new Democratic administration.

But the task force included Dennis Ross, the able Bush-Clinton Middle East negotiator who joined the Obama foreign policy circle this summer, suggesting its recommendations may find sympathetic ears inside the Obama transition team. Its rollout in classic Washington establishment fashion, complete with a Post opinion article, underscored the seriousness of its challenge.

The Coats-Robb report dismisses the prospects for a “grand bargain” between the United States and Iran – the approach advocated by former National Security Council staffers like Hillary Mann and Flynt Leverett. Indeed, the task force flatly denies that Tehran proposed such a settlement in 2003.

Believing that "the Islamic Republic is vulnerable to pressure," the task force offers, as a historical model to emulate, the elder Bush’s "willingness to engage in talks" regarding Iraq before the Kuwait war. Those talks, notably, were with other countries -- not with Iraq. The fact that those talks culminated in a major war does not trouble a task force that agrees "a military strike is a feasible option."

It is hard to see this "bipartisan" blueprint as attractive to newly empowered Democrats. After the Iraq experience, there will be considerable pushback against the claim that "the only permanent resolution may be regime change." An effort during the summer to deliver congressional endorsement of a naval blockade of Iranian ports – a key proposal of the Coats task force -- aroused intense opposition among antiwar Democrats and was quietly scuttled.

Israeli media reported in mid-October that Israel’s security establishment--expecting an Obama administration to initiate direct talks with Tehran—would press hard “to condition any talks between the West and Iran on halting uranium enrichment.” Such preconditions, of course, have been precisely the Bush administration’s line, and the barren results have, if anything, eroded Israel’s position in the region.

Other voices in Washington have been making the case for a much more vigorous pursuit of engagement. Five former secretaries of State told a George Washington University forum in September that the new administration needed direct engagement to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. Indeed, James Baker’s Iraq Study Group two years ago urged "diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions."

Former under secretary of State Thomas Pickering, perhaps America’s most respected career diplomat, declared at a Century Foundation roundtable in October that “it’s critically important that we find a way to open conversations…with the Iranians directly without preconditions” and “do all [we] can to deal with the center of Israeli concern, which is the Iranian nuclear program.”

The elder Bush’s U.N. representative urges the new administration to consider responding to the Iranian interest in direct flights to the United States. Others suggest inviting Iranian support for mulilateral provision of security for oil traffic in the Persian Gulf, or an incidents-at-sea agreement with Iran as a confidence-building (and war-avoidance) measure.

Such a change in approach would appear to be consistent with the president-elect’s hopes. Tehran’s congratulations to the president-elect suggest a dialogue leading to a negotiated package just might succeed. Just as he has been careful to keep open the option of military response to aggressive Iranian military action, Mr. Obama needs to avoid being locked into bankrupt policies of confrontation of the past.

Labels: United Nations, U.N., MaximsNews, Jeff Laurenti, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Iran, Israel, Dennis Ross, The Century Foundation, Iranian Nuclear Program

 

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