NEWSWEEK COVER: The Hidden War With Iran
NEW YORK, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- At least one former White House official tells Newsweek that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs, in the February 19 cover story, "The Hidden War With Iran" (on newsstands Monday, February 12).
Even if her fears are overwrought, the fact remains that the longstanding war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and Newsweek has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. On the chaotic battleground of Iraq, a hidden war between the United States and Iran is already unfolding. Iran has blamed the kidnapping of one of its diplomats on Feb. 4 on Iraqis linked to U.S. forces. Is conflict inevitable? U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran. But former secretary of State Colin Powell tells Newsweek that he thinks President Bush never had any intention of negotiating with the mullahs.
"My position in the remaining year and half [of my term] was that we ought to find ways to restart talks with Iran," Powell tells Newsweek. "But there was a reluctance on the part of the president to do that." He angrily rejects the administration's characterization of efforts by him and his top aides to deal with Tehran and Damascus as failures. "I don't like the administration saying, 'Powell went, [deputy Richard] Armitage went...and [they] got nothing.' We got plenty," he says. "You can't negotiate when you tell the other side, 'Give us what a negotiation would produce before the negotiations start'."
Ironically, the history of the Bush administration's dealings with Iran also offers a surprising degree of hope. A special investigation by a team of Newsweek reporters, led by Senior Editor Michael Hirsh in Washington and Correspondent Maziar Bahari in Tehran, has uncovered periods of marked cooperation and even tentative steps toward possible reconciliation in recent years-far more than is commonly realized:
* SEPTEMBER 2001: After September 11 in particular, relations grew warmer than at any time since the fall of the shah. America wanted Iran's help in Afghanistan, and Iran gave it, partly out of fear of an angry superpower and partly in order to be rid of its troublesome Taliban neighbors. Opinions differ wildly over how much help the Iranians actually were on the ground. But what is beyond doubt is how critical they were to stabilizing the country after the fall of Kabul.
In late November 2001, the leaders of Afghanistan's triumphant anti- Taliban factions flew to Bonn, Germany, to map out an interim Afghan government. Toward the end of the talks, the various parties had decided that the American-backed Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun tribal leader from the south, would lead the new Afghan government. On the night before the deal was to be signed, the Northern Alliance delegate Yunus Qanooni was stubbornly demanding 18 out of 24 new ministries. Frantic negotiators gathered in the suite of United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. The Iranian's team leader, Javad Zarif, translated for Qanooni. Finally, at close to 4 a.m., he leaned over to whisper in Qanooni's ear: "'This is the best deal you're going to get.'" The Afghan said, "'OK.'" That moment, Jim Dobbins, Bush's first envoy to the Afghans, now tells Newsweek, was critical. "The Russians and the Indians had been making similar points," he says. "But it wasn't until Zarif took him aside that it was settled... We might have had a situation like we had in Iraq, where we were never able to settle on a single leader and government." But a little over a month after the Bonn meeting, Iran was included with Iraq and North Korea in the "Axis of Evil." Once again, Iran's reformists were knocked back on their heels.
* SPRING 2003: Low-level meetings between the two sides had continued even after President Bush's Axis of Evil speech. At the beginning of 2003, as the Pentagon readied for battle against Iraq, the Americans wanted Tehran's help if a flood of refugees headed for the border, or if U.S. pilots were downed inside Iran. That spring, Washington received a faxed two-page proposal from Tehran for comprehensive bilateral talks, Newsweek reports. The letter received a mixed reception.
Powell and his deputy Armitage were suspicious. Armitage tells Newsweek he thinks the letter represented creative diplomacy by the Swiss ambassador, Tim Guldimann, who was serving as a go-between. "We couldn't determine what [in the proposal] was the Iranians' and what was the Swiss ambassador's," he says. He added that his impression at the time was that the Iranians "were trying to put too much on the table." But Mann now says, "I don't care if it originally came from Mars. If the Iranians said it was fully vetted and cleared, then it could have been as important as the two-page document" that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger received from Beijing in 1971 indicating Mao Zedong's interest in opening China. Powell, for one, thinks Bush simply wasn't prepared to deal with a regime he thought should not be in power. He met fierce resistance to any overtures to Iran and its ally Syria.
Every time America or Iran has gained an advantage over the other in the last five years, they've overplayed their hand, Newsweek reports. More pressure on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could well make him popular again -- the chief martyr in a martyr culture. Sunni insurgents in Iraq need only kill some Americans and plant Iranian IDs nearby to start a full-scale war. Like so many times in this complicated relationship, Newsweek concludes, this is a moment of opportunity. And one of equally great danger.
(Read entire cover story at http://www.newsweek.com/)
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