Burnt Offering
How a 2003 secret overture from Tehran might have led to a deal on Iran’s nuclear capacity -- if the Bush administration hadn’t rebuffed it.
...In the spring of 2003, the Islamic Republic of Iran not only proposed to negotiate with the Bush administration on its nuclear program and its support for terrorists but also offered concrete concessions that went very far toward meeting U.S. concerns. ....
The stubborn rejection by President Bush and his neoconservative advisers of normal diplomatic practice in their dealings with Iran, detailed for the first time here, raises grave questions about the Bush administration’s real motives as it maneuvers through the present crisis over Iran’s nuclear program. ...
Almost from the beginning of Bush’s presidency, two groups in the administration were waging an intense struggle over Iran, while the U.S. government went month after month without an official policy. Those officials who wanted to try diplomacy had a champion in Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, a close confidante of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Armitage had lived in Tehran for several months in 1975 as part of a Pentagon team trying to restrain the shah’s arms purchases, and he was “very interested” in Iran, according to Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. One of the reasons Armitage brought Middle East specialist Richard Haass into the department as head of the Office of Policy Planning, Wilkerson says, was to work on a new policy toward Iran.
Haass, for four years the senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the staff of the National Security Council under the first President Bush, began in the summer of 2001 to explore the possibilities for engaging Iran diplomatically, first through the easing of economic sanctions imposed in 1996 under the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act. But by the time the State Department was focused on the problem, it was already too late: The bill re-imposing those sanctions had been introduced in the House on January 3, 2001, even before Bush’s inauguration, and had no fewer than 250 co-sponsors. A source who worked on the issue at the time says the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee had been focusing on the legislation for months. The bill passed overwhelmingly in July 2001. ....
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