As Washington waits breathlessly for luminaries like Jim Baker,
Lee Hamilton, Vernon Jordan, Sandra Day O’Connor and the rest of
the Iraq Study Group to tell us what to do about Iraq, it’s past
time to knock down a myth that appears to be driving the panel’s
deliberations: the notion that the Bush administration’s refusal to
talk with Iran and Syria is the reason for our inability to
stabilize Iraq. The premise — pushed by Democratic politicians and
others — is absolutely false. The people pushing this, among them
Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Sen. Chuck Hagel, seem
intent on sandbagging President Bush into negotiating from a
position of weakness over some form of “grand bargain” with some of
our most deadly enemies. But the fact is that plenty of engagement
has already been taking place. For one thing, Syria retains an
embassy in Washington; and the United States has one in Damascus.
As for Iran, there are plenty of opportunities for the United
States to talk with it in forums such as the United Nations and the
International Atomic Energy Agency, where both states are
represented. And America has been trying for decades to resolve
differences diplomatically with both regimes. Since the September
11 attacks, Washington has held discussions with Tehran and
Damascus on a wide array of issues, including matters such as
Afghanistan; al Qaeda’s international terror networks; Iraq;
Lebanon and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The real issue today is that the Bush administration, which has
been repeatedly burned in recent years when it tried to engage
these governments, prefers discretion and holding lower-level
talks. These regimes insist on holding well-publicized summits that
yield them P.R. windfalls without forcing them to substantively
change their policies. The fact is that, since the Carter’s
presidency, U.S. administrations of both parties have tried
unsuccessfully to persuade these governments to end their support
for terrorism and their efforts to sabotage Washington’s efforts to
facilitate peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Following
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic November 1977 peace
mission to Israel, for example, the Carter administration attempted
to persuade Syrian President Hafez Assad (father of the current
Syrian strongman Bashar Assad) to join the Middle East peace
process. Assad responded by making Damascus the headquarters of a
rejection front dominated by the pro-Soviet terrorist groups like
George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and
Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine-General Command.
In 1982 and 1983, veteran U.S. diplomats Philip Habib and Morris
Draper conducted months of arduous shuttle diplomacy in an effort
to end the violence in Lebanon — a civil war that began in 1975,
followed by Israel’s 1982 military campaign to uproot Palestinian
terrorist groups based there. Syria did everything it could to
sabotage efforts to stabilize Lebanon: It likely facilitated the
September 1982 assassination of Lebanese leader Pierre Gemayel and
undoubtedly assisted the rise of the Iranian-backed Shi’ite terror
organization Hezbollah, whose “credits” included the October 23,
1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 241
U.S. servicemen. And for good measure, Syria waged an intimidation
campaign that forced the Lebanese government to abrogate the
U.S.-brokered May 1983 peace treaty it signed with Israel less than
a year later.
In recent days, Mr. Baker, arguing the importance of talking to
people we dislike, cites as an example his own shuttle diplomacy
effort while serving as secretary of state in 1991, when he
succeeded in cajoling Assad into participating in the Madrid
conference on Middle East peace. He said that, even though his
first 15 visits to Damascus did not succeed in persuading Assad to
participate, the 16th try was a charm: The Syrian strongman showed
up in Madrid after all. But what exactly did all of Mr. Baker’s
hard work achieve? Less than two years later, after Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat embarked on
the Oslo “peace process” at the White House with President Clinton
looking on, Syria embarked on a campaign to sabotage any
possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement by supporting
terrorist groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
During the 1990s, Rabin and subsequent Israeli leaders tried to
negotiate with Assad an agreement in which Israel would return the
Golan Heights, captured by Israel in a defensive war, to Syria in
exchange of a peace settlement. But Assad blocked any real progress
by refusing to negotiate seriously over security arrangements with
Israel. In May 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew its forces from
southern Lebanon, whereupon Syria responded by aiding the Hezbollah
buildup on Israel’s northern border that led to war on July 12,
2006, after Hezbollah crossed the border and kidnapped two Israeli
soldiers.
As all of its recent predecessors did with Hafez Assad, who died
in June 2000 , the Bush administration has also repeatedly tried
and failed to persuade his son and successor strongman, President
Bashar Assad, to be more cooperative. David Schenker, who served as
the Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestinian affairs adviser in the
office of the Secretary of Defense from 2002 to 2006, notes that
Washington sent at least five high-level delegations to Syria from
2001 until the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister
Rafiq Hariri in February 2005 in an effort “to cajole Bashar Assad
to change his unhelpful behavior.” The delegations dealt with
issues such as Syria’s efforts to destabilize Iraq; its continued
interference in Lebanon; and its support for Hezbollah and
Palestinian terrorist groups. All of these good-faith efforts
failed. Perhaps the best known was Secretary of State Colin
Powell’s May 2003 visit to Damascus — one month after the fall of
Saddam Hussein, and at the height of American power in the Bush
era. Assad agreed to Powell’s demand that he stop subverting Iraq,
but once Powell left, the Syrian dictator continued business as
usual. If this is the way he behaved toward an American secretary
of state at that time, how can we seriously believe things will
change for the better now, given all of the problems the U.S.
military is facing in Iraq; the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan;
and the success of Hezbollah and its allies in bringing Lebanon to
the verge of catastrophe.
If anything, good-faith U.S. efforts to reach out to the Islamic
Republic of Iran dating back to the Carter Administration have been
an even more abysmal failure. In the wake of the February 1979
Iranian Revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a
U.S. ally, the Carter Administration tried to reach out to
establish a dialogue with the new Iranian government. So, on Nov.
1, 1979, National Security Adviser Brzezinski met in Algiers with
Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, a relatively powerless
Iranian “moderate.” In response, student radicals seized the
American Embassy in Tehran, beginning the hostage crisis that
continued until the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated
president. The students received backing from the Ayatollah
Khomeini, who had little use for Bazargan and was intent on
humiliating the “Great Satan.” President Reagan — a political
giant whose successes included ending the Cold War — fared little
better in dealing with the Iranians, as evidence by the failed
effort to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American
hostages captured by Iran’s Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon.
Another major U.S. effort to talk with the Iranians occurred in
1998, after the election of Mohammed Khatami, who talked
elyptically of dialogue with the West. In response, the Clinton
Administration began to back away from the 1996 Iran-Libya
Sanctions Act, legislation imposing sanctions against foreign
companies that invest in the Iranian oil and gas industries.
Scholars Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin note in their book
Eternal Iran that the softening of the U.S. position
averted a crisis over a French investment of $2 billion in Iran’s
South Pars oil field. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright also
apologized for the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that brought the Shah
to power. And the Clinton administration, according to FBI Director
Louis Freeh, dragged its feet in investigating the June 1996
bombing of a U.S. housing facility in Saudi Arabia, in which 19
American servicemen were killed, apparently by terrorists supported
by Iran. All of this came to naught, as the Iranians demanded
reparations from the United States and the Ayatollah Khamenei
denounced rapprochement with Washington as “treason.”
One area where the two countries were able to cooperate was
Afghanistan, where both Washington and Tehran opposed the Taliban
regime before and after the September 11 terrorist attacks. But
Washington dramatically scaled back cooperation after Israel’s
January 2002 apprehension of the Karine-A, a ship carrying 50 tons
of Iranian-supplied weapons to Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.
President Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the “axis of evil” in his
2002 State of the Union address came just weeks after the Karine-A
discovery. In May 2003, Washington reversed its willingness to
cooperate with Iran after learning that it was harboring al Qaeda
terrorists, including some who were implicated in a bombing in
Saudi Arabia that month in which eight Americans were killed. In
March, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, responding to European
calls for a dialogue with Iran over its nuclear weapons program,
announced that Washington would end its opposition to Iranian
membership in the World Trade Organization and an array of other
steps in an effort to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear weapons
activities. Iran responded with defiance — and for good measure,
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected last year, has made
statements denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel’s
destruction a regular staple of his rhetoric.
Based on the historical record, the advocates of U.S. engagement
with these regimes are delusional. The record, from Carter to Bush
II, strongly suggests that neither regime has any interest in
cooperating with us in Iraq, and are more likely than not to view
the Carter-Brzezinski-Hagel approach as a demonstration of American
weakness.
