• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3698 0

as Middle East envoy for President Reagan how unproductive the many meetings with the Syrians had been. Because they had little incentive to make concessions, our diplomatic efforts appeared to them as signs of weakness that they could exploit. At the same time, there were occasions when I did see advantages to meeting with adversaries, such as Saddam Hussein, when there seemed to be reasons to believe that we might find some common interests. We had to be clear-eyed as to precisely what our goals were before sitting down at the negotiating table. We needed to understand what our interests were, what the other nation’s interests were, and in what ways they might coincide, if at all. We also needed to know what our leverage was and what the other side’s leverage might be.

Since 1979, Iran has considered itself at war with the United States, which it calls the Great Satan. Iran has taken the Soviet Union’s place in the Middle East, forming the core of a resistance bloc that is ready to ally with any state or organization at odds with the United States, the West, and our Sunni Arab friends in Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf.

Since the radical Islamist regime came to power there, no other nation in the world has been responsible for as many deaths to U.S. troops as Iran. The 1983 attack against the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon was organized by Iran. Beginning in 2004, Iran began supplying Iraqi insurgents with explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), especially deadly improvised explosive devices. Iran was training Shia insurgent groups in Iraq to use them. “If we know so much about what Iran is doing in Iraq, why don’t we do something about it?” read one of my November memos to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.24 But a country strained by two wars and an administration battling criticism and declining public approval was not ready to be firm with Iran. The prospect of another confrontation left many searching for other options.

With nearly two hundred thousand U.S. troops in two countries bordering Iran, the regime could not discount the strength we had in the region. Since Iranian Revolutionary Guard members and its elite branch, the Quds Force, were training and arming Iraqi militants to kill Americans, I thought we could pursue them within Iraq with special operations raids. We also could seek stricter sanctions—especially on gasoline, which Iran lacked the capacity to refine—putting pressure on the regime and further isolating it from the international community. The possibilities of military pressure and diplomatic engagement were not mutually exclusive. Rather, the task was to closely link the two.

To change the Iranian regime’s behavior, I believed one of our best options was to aid the freedom movement inside Iran. Supporting those locked away in Iranian prisons might eventually lead to something like the Soviet Union’s downfall, which Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II hastened by supporting Soviet dissidents. Millions of Iranians chafed at the rule of the ayatollahs. This became clear After protesters in the Green movement took to the streets in the wake of fraudulent elections in June 2009. DoD policy officials wrote a number of memos suggesting ways to reach out to the Iranian opposition movement: bringing their leaders to the White House, supporting them financially, providing them with technology to communicate with one another and to the outside world, and more forcefully speaking about the nature of the evil regime they were opposing.

Ultimately, the President decided that negotiations were the best way to try to deal with Iran. Every American administration since the Iranian revolution has participated in some form of diplomatic engagement with them; publicly, privately, or both. Beginning with Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad in December 2001, the Bush administration also authorized American diplomats to hold discussions of one type or another with representatives from Iran, but nothing as substantial as the policy of engagement the State Department began to pursue in 2006. In an April 2006