Who is Making Tehran’s Iraq Policy?

Farideh Farhi

I have to admit that I am quite mystified by the never-ending search for finding the one person that “really” makes policy in Iran. The latest example of this search can be found in David Ignatius’s Washington Post column in which we are informed that it is really not the “bombastic” Ahmadinejad but the “soft-spoken” commander of the Qods Force of Islamic Revolution’s Guard Corps (IRGC), Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani, “who plays a decisive role in his nation's confrontation with the United States.” Soleimani’s name has in fact been in the news for a while because of his reported role in brokering the cease-fire that restored calm in Basra in March.

Perhaps it is the history of the United States’ dealings with most Middle Eastern countries (Israel and Turkey excepted) and the tradition or habit of dealing with one man as the ultimate decision maker that creates the hope or aspiration to find the one person that holds the key to Iran’s policy making process. Or perhaps it is the tendency, when in doubt or short evidence, to go with the fad of the moment.

I understand that it is now in vogue to talk about the IRGC in general and the Qods Force as the THE power in Iran (with consequential impact throughout the Middle East). I have not found this argument to be very convincing. My take continues to be that the military in Iran has traditionally been and continues to be under civilian control, even if the Guards hierarchy as well as its individual members have and do play an important role in Iranian politics. The birth of the Islamic Republic was inextricably linked to the Iran-Iraq War and as such it should not be surprisingly to anyone that the body and individuals that played important roles in that war continue to be influential. Ironically, to my mind, the comparable country in this regard has always been Israel, another Middle Eastern political system born and bred in war.

In any case, even if there has been a rise in the power of hard-line IRGC men, I find the focus on one individual quite unpersuasive, particularly since the sources that have talked about Soleimani’s key role in Iran are all from outside of Iran (in the case of Ignatius' piece, the source is one “Arab who meets regularly with Soleimani”).

This is not to say that someone like Soleimani has no influence in Iran's decision making process. From what I understand, although I cannot be sure, Soleimani sits in the committee for regional affairs of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council-- consisting of him as well as the chief of intelligence of IRGC, the deputy foreign minister for Arab and African affairs (who also heads the Foreign Ministry's Iraq Desk), Mohammd Reza Baqer, a team of experts on Iranian-Arab relations and Iran's ambassadors to Arab countries (Hassan Kazemi-Qomi in the case of Iraq). Focusing in particular on developments in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian territories, the task of this committee is to advise on the appropriate policies to be pursued. But the final decision makers are civilians (some well known because of their institutional positions and others like the head of supreme leader Khamenei's security office, the cleric Asghar Hejazi or his chief of staff Mohammad Golpayegani - also a cleric - wielding less publicized influence).

Furthermore, regarding Iran’s Iraq policy, I just can't believe that Soleimani wields more (or for that matter less) influence or has more input in the decision making process than let us say the current head of IRGC, Mohammad Ali (Aziz) Jaafari, who prior to his current position was in charge of setting up IRGC's Strategic Center, a center tasked with drawing up a new command structure and military strategy, preparing the country for the changing regional environment and the kind of foreign military confrontation it may have to face; or Iran’s Iraq ambassador Kazemi Qomi, reportedly himself a former Qods force member.

These key individuals and many others must be in constant interaction to set and reassess policies that are partially shaped by a long-term interest in a relatively calm Iraq that maintains close political, economic, and security relations with Iran and also developed in reaction to Iraq’s complex domestic dynamics and US plans for that country.

Within this context one does not need to search for a scheming and all powerful individual like Soleimani to figure out that the Iranian leadership as a whole, in all its contentious variety, would have to be engaged in constant conversation and planning (and at times improvisation) about how to stunt plans that would make the US military presence in Iraq permanent or make that country a launching pad for an attack on Iran (rejection of this possibility was by the way precisely the assurance Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was repeatedly giving Iranian leaders in his current visit to Tehran).

One also doesn’t have to be a genius to guess that, hunkered down in a security and paranoid mode due to the escalating economic and political pressures (not to mention military threats) faced in the past couple of years, the Iranian policy makers are trying very hard to convince the Bush Administration, from my point of view hopefully successfully, that an attack on Iran will be costly.

Major development: Campaign to disable the Jaish al-Mahdi in Iraq [cross-listing]

From the field: Major development: Campaign to disable the Jaish al-Mahdi in Iraq#links

Yesterday, Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki indicated that militias had to disarm. His focus is, of course, the militia that is part of the al-Sadr movement or current, the jaish al-mahdi. He seems somehow less preoccupied with the al-Badr brigade militia which is part of SIIC. No doubt, getting rid of all militias is a wonderful idea, but starting with the Sadrists may not be wise.

I remember sitting in Beirut with an old friend about the time of the invasion. He was a shrewd observer (and a Shi'i Muslim), who I had known for decades. He was happy to see Saddam toppled, but he was distressed by how poorly prepared the US was to deal with Iraq. He said, despite the mistakes, this will be ok provided the US does not alienate the Shi'a in Iraq. "If you do that, then it is all over."

Muqtada al-Sadr sits atop a mobilized underclass community that is too unwieldy to encompass in a well-integrated party, and he is not the greatest leader, but he does have unique authority as a sayyid (or descendant of the Prophet), as the son and former aide of Ayatollah M. Sadiq al-Sadr and as part of a distinguished clerical family with branches in Lebanon and Iran, as well as Iraq. He alone can sit atop the volcano. If he loses control, then Katie bar the door.

When my Iraq Study Group colleagues fantasized about how things might be if Muqtada would disappear, I warned them to watch what they wish for.

For the moment, the ceasefire or freeze that has been in place since August seems to be out the door. Violence will likely increase, as illustrated by the rocketing of the Green Zone (three Americans killed) today, following a U.S. raid in Sadr City.

There is a good chance that the US will end up seeking Iranian help to end it the fighting with the Sadrists (as al-Maliki had to do in al-Basrah, although he now denies it). Or, maybe will decide to strike Iran too! Yeah, that would help.

Our political dilemma is that our Iraqi Shi'i "friends" don't have the popular base that Muqtada does, not are likely to any time soon.

Rubin: Iran Saves the Surge

Has anyone noticed that Iran is saving the Bush administration's surge in Iraq?

CNN:

Iran was integral in persuading Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to halt attacks by his militia on Iraqi security forces, an Iraqi lawmaker said Monday.

Haidar al-Abadi, who is with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa Party, said Iraqi Shiite lawmakers traveled Friday to Iran to meet with al-Sadr. They returned Sunday, the day al-Sadr told his Mehdi Army fighters to stand down. . . .

The lawmakers who traveled to Iran to broker the cease-fire were from five Shiite parties, including the Sadrist movement. Al-Abadi would not say where in Iran the meeting was held.

When Iran Revolutionary Guards helped the U.S. destroy al-Qaida's bases in Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and form an interim government under UN supervision, the Bush administration responded by putting Iran (then led by President Muhammad Khatami) on the "axis of evil." Now battles between the pro-Iranian militia brought to power by the U.S. (al-Da'wa) and a more Iraqi nationalist Shi'a militia (the Sadr movement) threaten to reverse the precarious security gains of the surge by dividing the ruling coalition of Shi'a parties. Iran convenes them on its territory, and the battle is calmed.

I wonder how Bush and Cheney will react this time....

Town Hall Video on Iraq

On March 26, 2009, the Foreign Policy Association sponsored a town hall discussion in Manhattan on Iraq. The speakers were Frederick Kagan and Augustus R. Norton and the chair was Larry Korb. The Foreign Policy Association website includes a streaming video of the event, as well as speakers' bios and related materials.

WHO/Iraqi study of civilian deaths (UPDATED)

(Also posted on my own blog.)

The new study, which includes more extensive sampling than the earlier one published in Lancet in 2006, estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died violent deaths in the first three years (2003-6) following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There is still a likelihood of undercounting, but this is likely to be right order of magnitude. This is a sobering finding and it helps to emphasize the horrors through which Iraqis have lived. (Previous comment here.)

The new study will appear in the New England Journal of Medicine, January 31, 2008. Catherine and John Brownstein's "perspective" on the study will also appear in the January 31 issue, but an advance copy is available here.

New Estimate of Violent Deaths Among Iraqis Is Lower

Bush-Cheney Threaten U.S. Security: Where's the Accountability?

I know that I am supposed to be writing here as a "highly respected," "wonky, moderate, and thoroughly analytical" scholar, not just another partisan blogger. But sometimes it's hard to make the distinction.

Last June 29, I was in Ohrid, Macedonia for a conference of the NATO Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, which brought together delegations from all members of NATO and the Partnership for Peace to discuss current issues, including the NATO mission in Afghanistan. (Left- Hekmat Karzai, Director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul, poses with me in front of the ancient Greco-Roman Theater in Ohrid). After the closing plenary, a U.S. NATO official came over to offer some friendly advice. I was losing credibility in international meetings, he suggested, because my (see adjectives above) expertise on Afghanistan was being colored by my domestic political agenda. I thanked him for his constructive criticism and began to consider whether he might be right. After all, the administration had changed many (though hardly all) of the policies I had been criticizing since 2001. Couldn't I take yes for an answer?

When I got back to the hotel, I found an e-mail from Juan Cole inviting me to join this group blog, which he was just setting up. Before answering, I glanced over at Informed Comment, to see what Juan was writing about. I found this:

Bush said in a speech on Thursday that he hopes Iraq will be like Israel, a democracy that faces terrorist violence but manages to retain its democratic character:

' In Israel, Bush said, "terrorists have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq." '

These words may be the stupidest ones ever uttered by a US president. Given their likely impact on the US war effort in the Middle East, they are downright criminal.

Juan noted that telling Middle Easterners that the U.S. wants Iraq to be just like Israel was not an effective way to build regional support for our effort. He archived this story under the tag, "Monumental stupidity."

I answered Juan, gladly accepting the invitation, and added a note telling him about the NATO official's comment. I concluded:

I thought maybe he was right. Then I went back to the hotel and read your post from today. I think my domestic political agenda is the result of my knowledge of the rest of the world.

In this spirit, I would like to draw readers' attention to the following bizarre fact: The Bush-Cheney administration still enjoys some vestige of credibility when claiming that its policies defend the national security of the United States, and the Democratic Party presidential candidates and Congressional Leadership sometimes seem afraid of challenging the administration too directly for fear of being seen as soft on terrorism.

As a wonky, moderate, highly respected, and thoroughly analytical scholar, I do not express myself in simplistic partisan formulae. But politicians do. That's their job. If I were a politician, for instance, I might say something like this:

The Bush-Cheney administration has surrendered much of Afghanistan to the Taliban and much of Pakistan to al-Qaida. They have turned most of Iraq over to Iran, creating the very danger over which they now threaten another disastrous war; they have strained the U.S. Armed Forces to the point of exhaustion, turned the Defense Department over to private contractors, the Justice Department over to the Republican National Committee, and the national debt over to foreign creditors, while leading a party whose single most basic belief is supposed to be that individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions. And they dare to lecture us on national security?

Allow me to illustrate these (slight) overstatements with a few current reports.

On Afghanistan, I have already commented on recent analyses of how the Bush-Cheney adminstration fecklessly under-invested in Afghanistan, assuring that the weak government of Hamid Karzai would lack the resources needed to establish itself throughout the country. Since the recent New York Times report was based on interviews with most of the U.S.'s former ambassadors and military commanders in Afghanistan, I won't bother to re-argue the point here. Especially since a former CIA counter-terrorism official (who led the team that captured Abu Zubayda) and a former State Department official (now working for Kissinger Associates, not MoveOn.org) observe in Sunday's LA Times:

Afghanistan -- former Taliban stronghold, Al Qaeda haven and warlord-cum-heroin-smuggler finishing school -- feels more and more like Sept. 10, 2001, than a victory in the U.S. war on terrorism.

The country is, plain and simple, a mess. Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies have quietly regained territory, rendering wide swaths of the country off-limits to U.S. and Afghan forces, international aid workers and even journalists. Violent attacks against Western interests are routine. Even Kabul, which the White House has held up as a postcard for what is possible in Afghanistan, has become so dangerous that foreign embassies are in states of lockdown, diplomats do not leave their offices, and venturing beyond security perimeters requires daylight-only travel, armored vehicles, Kevlar and armed escorts.

For more of the same, see Jim Rupert's report from the remote province of Nuristan in the northeast. Of course the administration has changed so much of its original policy on Afghanistan that its claims to have done the right thing there are in their last throes, supported by only a few dead-enders such as the delusional Donald Rumsfeld.

Pakistan? Here's another article from Sunday's L. A. Times:

Political turmoil and a spate of brazen attacks by Taliban fighters are forcing Pakistan's president to scale back his government's pursuit of Al Qaeda, according to U.S. intelligence officials who fear that the terrorist network will be able to accelerate its efforts to rebuild and plot new attacks.

The development threatens a pillar of U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, which has depended on Pakistan to play a lead role in keeping Al Qaeda under pressure to reduce its ability to coordinate strikes.

It just gets better from there; you should read the whole article. As I noted previously, the legitimacy of the government is collapsing in Pakistan, the result of a fully predictable (and predicted) political crisis that has been gathering steam for over a year. How did the Bush administration respond? By announcing in January that Ambassador Ryan Crocker would be transferred from Islamabad to Baghdad and then by not replacing him until July. And by fully supporting General Musharraf's contempt for rule of law and democracy until he had provoked much of Pakistan's middle class to take to the streets against him.

Ambassador Crocker now has the demanding task of trying to nudge the Iranian backed Iraqi Shi'a factions that the U.S. installed in power to reconcile with the Sunni Ba'athi factions that the U.S. removed from power (but whose willingness to take arms and money from the U.S. is now cited as the main indicator of U.S. success). And good luck to him.

Meanwhile, back at the war on those who attacked us on 9/11 (not Iraqi Shi'a militias, Iran, or Ba'athists, as far as I know): according to the National Intelligence Estimate on "The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland," which was prepared while the ambassador's residence in Islamabad was vacant:

Al-Qa’ida is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities. We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safe haven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership.

In the past few weeks, a reinvigorated Bin Laden has released both a video aimed at asserting his leadership of the global struggle against U.S. dominance, promising that "Islam" would solve the crises of imperialism, high taxes, and sub-prime mortgages, and an audio tape aimed at al-Qa'ida's most strategic target market, the population of Pakistan, where Bin Laden and his senior advisors are now safely ensconced. In the audio tape Bin Laden fulsomely praises the "tribes of Waziristan" and several Pakistani Taliban leaders, while omitting support for any Afghan group. This indicates where his real sanctuary in the region lies.

Iraq and Iran? I cede to Juan Cole, Scott Horton, and numerous others the thankless labor of documenting the administration's crimes and blunders in Iraq, a task I would compare to trying to convince a skeptical audience that water is wet. But since the administration (now abetted by CBS's 60 Minutes) is furiously accusing Iran of support for Shi'a militias in Iraq, it seems appropriate to recall a few basic facts about the situation in Iraq, helpfully laid out by Peter Galbraith in the New York Review of Books. Peter first visited Iraqi Kurdistan in, I think, 1989. He was one of the first outsiders to document the atrocities of Operation Anfal, at a time that the first Bush administration was giving Saddam a pass on killing Kurds, as long as he stood against Iran. At that time Peter was a senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since then he has been Ambassador to Croatia and held a senior U.N. post in East Timor. I last saw Peter in Heathrow airport just before Thanksgiving last year, when we crossed paths as he returned from Iraq and I from Afghanistan.

An Afghan friend once remarked that Americans, unlike Afghans, seemed to require "memory facilitation," which Peter's article helpfully provides:

Iraqi forces [in the south] are dominated by the Badr Organization, a militia founded, trained, armed, and financed by Iran. When US forces ousted Saddam's regime from the south in early April 2003, the Badr Organization infiltrated from Iran to fill the void left by the Bush administration's failure to plan for security and governance in post-invasion Iraq.

In the months that followed, the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) appointed Badr Organization leaders to key positions in Iraq's American-created army and police. At the same time, L. Paul Bremer's CPA appointed party officials from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) to be governors and serve on governorate councils throughout southern Iraq. SCIRI, recently renamed the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), was founded at the Ayatollah Khomeini's direction in Tehran in 1982. The Badr Organization is the militia associated with SCIRI.

In the January 2005 elections, SCIRI became the most important component of Iraq's ruling Shiite coalition. In exchange for not taking the prime minister's slot, SCIRI won the right to name key ministers, including the minister of the interior. From that ministry, SCIRI placed Badr militiamen throughout Iraq's national police.

In short, George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he warned would be a disastrous consequence of a US withdrawal from Iraq: the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia.

Peter notes, as seems obvious but is ignored by most discussion in the U.S., that the Bush administration's stupendous blunders in Iraq have handed Iran a "far-reaching" "strategic victory." He illustrates his claim that "the scale of the American miscalculation is striking" with one of the by-now familiar astoundingly wrong quotations from the administration's strategic thinkers, in this case Paul Wolfowitz confidently asserting that a Shi'a-led Iraq will undermine Iran.

On the exhaustion and depletion of the U.S. Army, see this, this, and many other stories, including the recent ones explaining how the post-"surge" troop reduction is required regardless of "success" in order to keep the Army from collapsing. Scott Horton at Harpers provides complete coverage (and original investigation) of both the privatization of the U.S. Defense Department and the transformation of the Justice Department into a branch of the RNC. On the financing of the debt caused by the combination of tax cuts and uncontrolled spending on everything but social services for those who really need them, see this table of foreign holders of U.S. Treasury Securities.

Accountability, anyone?

Rollout to War with Iran: An Update

Update: Since I posted the original note on this topic Wednesday night, there have been several developments. Several more well-informed people have called to discuss it -- all of them with confirming information. No one called to say I was wrong.

The original cross-post that I put on DailyKos at 11:26 PM Wednesday night sank off the front page in the wee small hours of the morning, while the whole wide world was fast asleep. On Thursday, however, DailyKos diarist Scientician saw Juan Cole's plug on Informed Comment. He checked me out on the web and determined that I was a "respectable foreign affairs academic" (not always a compliment on DailyKos). That morning he nonetheless posted a diary that made it to the top of the recommended list, finally garnering 561 comments, many of them by people who appear not to be lunatics.

Then on Friday New Yorker contributor George Packer called. After our conversation he wrote about it on his blog Interesting Times:

If there were a threat level on the possibility of war with Iran, it might have just gone up to orange. Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University, has written an account of a conversation with a friend who has connections to someone at a neoconservative institution in Washington.

His evaluation: "True? I don’t know. Plausible? Absolutely."

Later he put up a postscript:

Barnett Rubin just called me. His source spoke with a neocon think-tanker who corroborated the story of the propaganda campaign and had this to say about it: “I am a Republican. I am a conservative. But I’m not a raging lunatic. This is lunatic.”

Today, the first day of Magical September (hat-tip to openthread at DailyKos), Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine picked up the story on his No Comment blog, under the title, The New Rollout. Horton summarized my post and Packer's entry and then adds:

And no sooner does this appear in the blogosphere than we see what may be the first bit of ground-preparation for the rollout: Michael Ledeen’s new book, set for release right on schedule a week after Labor Day, and it’s called—get this–Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction. What’s the point in being subtle when you’re trying to run herd on what Nietzsche called the “bovine masses?” Here’s the blurb:

“Michael A. Ledeen has written a knowing book about Iran’s ways. His is a book that lays bare the cruelties of the radical theocracy and its ambitions beyond its borders. After Ledeen’s book, the illusions about Iran should finally be put to rest. A smart and unsentimental work.”

Ledeen, the author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, among other classics, is a fluent Italian speaker with curious connections to the Italian state security and the yellowcake uranium caper. No doubt Michael thinks that somewhere out in the ethersphere, Niccolò is smiling. I think that Niccolò was smarter than that: he’s wincing.

Somewhere in the etheral blogosphere, diarist WilyFlorentine is preparing to post a few lessons:

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

And finally:

No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.

Since Ledeen is an expert on Machiavelli, the latter quote might argue that the rollout proves that war talk is a bluff designed to pressure Iran into agreeing to the demands of the European negotiators over nuclear enrichment. But brinkmanship works only when the other side has something to gain by conceding. That might be true if the administration's goal really was to prevent Iran from gaining full control of the nuclear fuel cycle. Rhetoric like President Bush's speech to the American Legion and Ledeen's book, however, only further convince Tehran that nothing short of forcible regime change will satisfy Washington.

Perhaps the war party will answer with another quotation from Chapter 17 of The Prince:

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

In a speech delivered in Macchiavelli's native Florence, "The Danger of Being Hated," Scott Horton provided a fitting answer. He reminded his audience that the original formulation "Let them hate us, so long as they fear us," comes not from Macchiavelli, but from the insane Roman Emperor Caligula. Horton comments:

In chapter 17 of The Prince Machiavelli says that “it is much safer to be feared than loved”–a very shrewd rearrangement of Caligula’s statement. But he doesn’t stop there–he goes on immediately to say that the one of the worst mistakes a prince can ever make is to be hated; for in this way he converts himself to a target. He compounds the risks he personally and his subjects must face.

The balance that Machiavelli commends to us is this: don’t strive to be loved, but at all costs avoid being hated. A modern state need not flinch from being feared, but its position is strongest when it exhibits the values of virtue of which he writes. A state which is seen as virtuous, strong and decisive is best able to assure its security.

But there is one counsel of Macchiavelli's that even those who (unlike me) consider the Islamic Republic of Iran an irreconcilable enemy, ought to remember: that any injury done by the Prince should be so great that the victim is "unable to retaliate." And that is why the public and the press must at least ask the questions posed by Packer:

Does the Administration expect the Iranian regime to fall in the event of an attack? If yes, what will replace it? If no (and it will not), why would the Administration deliberately set about to strengthen the regime’s hold on power? What will the Administration do to protect highly vulnerable American lives and interests in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the world against the Iranian reprisals that will follow? What if Iran strikes against Israel? What will be the strategy when the Iranian nuclear program, damaged but not destroyed, resumes? How will the Administration handle the international alarm and opprobrium that would be an attack’s inevitable fallout?

Writing on the futility of relying solely on force, Machiavelli counseled:

For this reason the best possible fortress is--not to be hated by the people, because, although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the people hate you

That is why today, more even than when this Republic was founded, we owe “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Today the U.S. is less loved, less respected, and after the debacle in Iraq, less feared but for its folly, than ever before. And that is the greatest threat to our security.

Post Labor Day Product Rollout: War with Iran (Cross-posted at DailyKos)!

On September 7, 2002, The New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth Bushmiller treated readers to an explanation of how the Bush administration planned to sell the invasion of Iraq:

White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.

The rollout of the strategy this week, they said, was planned long before President Bush's vacation in Texas last month. It was not hastily concocted, they insisted, after some prominent Republicans began to raise doubts about moving against Mr. Hussein and administration officials made contradictory statements about the need for weapons inspectors in Iraq.

The White House decided, they said, that even with the appearance of disarray it was still more advantageous to wait until after Labor Day to kick off their plan.

''From a marketing point of view,'' said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, ''you don't introduce new products in August.''

A centerpiece of the strategy, White House officials said, is to use Mr. Bush's speech on Sept. 11 to help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq, which could come early next year.

This September 11, we will have the reports from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, filtered through a White House drafted report.

I watched Vice-President Cheney's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, in the residence where I was staying in Kabul, Afghanistan. I heard Cheney deliver his famous falsehood:

The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago. These are not weapons for the purpose of defending Iraq; these are offensive weapons for the purpose of inflicting death on a massive scale, developed so that Saddam can hold the threat over the head of anyone he chooses, in his own region or beyond.

We know the results.

This year, on August 28, President Bush spoke to another veterans' group, the American Legion. He called Iran "the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism," whose "active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust." He concluded:

Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late.

But this apparently is just test marketing, like Cheney's 2002 speech. After all "from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Today I received a message from a friend who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient. According to this report, as in 2002, the rollout will start after Labor Day, with a big kickoff on September 11. My friend had spoken to someone in one of the leading neo-conservative institutions. He summarized what he was told this way:

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

Of course I cannot verify this report. But besides all the other pieces of information about this circulating, I heard last week from a former U.S. government contractor. According to this friend, someone in the Department of Defense called, asking for cost estimates for a model for reconstruction in Asia. The former contractor finally concluded that the model was intended for Iran. This anecdote is also inconclusive, but it is consistent with the depth of planning that went into the reconstruction effort in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I hesitated before posting this. I don't want to spread alarmist rumors. I don't want to lessen the pressure on the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran. But there are too many signs of another irresponsible military adventure from the Cheney-Bush administration for me just to dismiss these reports. I am putting them into the public sphere in the hope of helping to mobilize opposition to a policy that would further doom the efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq and burden our country and the people of the Middle East with yet another unstoppable fountain of bloodshed.

Counter-Narcotics in Afghanistan (First Installment): Defining the Problem

The U.S. Department of State Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement released a new “U.S. Counternarcotics Strategy for Afghanistan” this month. The strategy calls for added efforts in all pillars of the Counter-Narcotics effort in Afghanistan, but its most salient change from the past is its proposal for more forceful and extensive eradication of opium poppy crops. The Strategy calls for “non-negotiated” eradication, ostensibly in order to avoid the manipulation of eradication by local elites to exempt their own crops and focus eradication on their rivals or the powerless. While the Strategy states that no means of eradication will be used without the approval of the Government of Afghanistan, it contains many examples of thinly veiled pressure on the Government of Afghanistan to authorize the spraying of herbicides both from the ground and from the air.

Implementation of this strategy will lead to a rapid deterioration of security at least in the south of the country and the further weakening of the Afghan government. Afghans will conclude (if they have not so concluded already) that the U.S. does not consider Afghanistan to be sovereign and that the foreigners are in Afghanistan to pursue their own agenda, not to help Afghanistan. Significant portions of the countryside that have been neutral or pro-government will move toward the Taliban. The farmers will respond to the greater risk imposed by eradication not by stopping poppy cultivation but by preventing the government and international community from entering their areas. By and large, they will succeed, especially as US resources, credibility, and alliances continue to be drained by the disastrous war in Iraq.

Currently, the Taliban-led insurgency does not have stable and exclusive control of any significant territory and population in Afghanistan, as does the FARC in Colombia. Areas subject to aerial spraying for crop eradication, however, are likely to come under much more stable Taliban control. The government and its international supporters will be unable to enter such areas to provide development assistance or to engage in interdiction. Hence the more that aggressive eradication and aerial spraying are introduced before Afghans believe they have secure alternative livelihoods, the more the counter-narcotics policy will be reduced to eradication by military means, amounting to a war on the livelihood of the part of the Afghan rural population most vulnerable to Taliban influence.

Implementation of this strategy will also undermine attempts to stabilize the tribal areas of Pakistan and Baluchistan, by providing incentives for drug traffickers to move their operations into those areas just as Pakistan is undergoing a political crisis with unpredictable results.

The continuing escalation of tension between the U.S. and Iran will also promote the success of drug trafficking, as does the lack of U.S.-Iranian cooperation on counter-narcotics, the policy area where they have the clearest common interest. If the administration attacks Iran, as many observers are predicting, Iran will respond in such a way as to make much of Afghanistan ungovernable, including regions that the US government seems to think are under the stable control of the government. Counter-narcotics and many other policies will become impossible to implement. Iran's current activities in Afghanistan are both preparing for such an eventuality and signaling what it can do. As I will discuss in subsequent posts, the administration can have a confrontation with Iran or some success in Afghanistan, but not both.

I have read only the unclassified version of the Strategy. I am told that the classified version includes some of the elements that are missing in the open version, in particular on money laundering and high-level corruption. Those with the needed access can decide whether those sections meet some of the objections in my critique.

In a short series of posts, I will suggest why I find the proposed strategy so dangerous to international strategic goals in Afghanistan. In these posts I will confine myself to considering strategies within the framework of the current prohibitionist international regime for narcotics, including opium and its derivatives. I have argued elsewhere (including in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee), that

The international drug control regime, which criminalizes narcotics, does not reduce drug use, but it does produce huge profits for criminals and the armed groups and corrupt officials who protect them. Our drug policy grants huge subsidies to our enemies.

Over the next few years, at least, we will be working within that regime, which I take as a given here.

This first post deals with defining the problem and understanding the situation.

Overall goals:

The overriding goal of the U.S. and allies in Afghanistan is stabilizing the government and the region to (1) assure that al-Qaida cannot re-establish its bases in Afghanistan and (2) destroy al-Qaida’s current sanctuary in some of Pakistan’s tribal agencies. There are (and were long before 9/11) moral, humanitarian, and altruistic reasons to try to heal the wounds of Afghanistan and provide its people with a better life, but those reasons did not inspire the intervention that has been taking place since October 2001. The strategic goal is related to the ethical ones, however: the only long-term way to secure the region is to strengthen the state institutions and economies of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to the point that they can enforce norms of the international system with the consent of the people throughout their territories.

Among the many reasons that the US, UN, NATO, and dozens of donors and troop contributors are NOT in Afghanistan is to stop drug addiction in Europe or the U.S. Mounting a major state building effort in Afghanistan would hardly be the appropriate means to attain that goal. This does not mean that Donald Rumsfeld’s original policy of turning a blind eye to drug trafficking by counter-terrorism allies was right. That view of counter-narcotics was based on the same myopic vision that saw counter-terrorism solely as a "kill and capture" mission, whereas it can succeed only if it establishes the basis for effective security and policing. Policing and law enforcement, unlike military action, require the consent of the bulk of the population. That is why efforts to eliminate narcotics in a badly governed or ungoverned state tend to drift into a military mode (war on drugs). I will explain that when I discuss interdiction.

So what is the problem posed by the narcotics economy? The narcotics sector consists of economic activities whose profit (or rent) derives from illegality. The final price of narcotics is determined mainly by the cost of smuggling and distributing an illegal product rather than by conventional costs of production. Afghanistan’s principal comparative advantage is not in poppy cultivation but in the production of illegality. It is cheaper to engage in illegal activity in Afghanistan than almost anywhere else in the world. Iraq is catching up, however. Having first followed Afghanistan's lead in becoming a major haven for transnational terrorism, Iraq is now starting to produce opium poppies.

Thus Afghanistan's drug economy expanded when the state broke down after 1992. It consolidated itself and expanded further under the Taliban, because the Islamic Emirate was a peculiar type of state: internally it strictly enforced its own laws and brought security to trade routes and rural areas, at least in the Pashtun zones. But the government was not recognized internationally and did not recognize international law. Narcotics was profitable because it was illegal beyond the borders of Afghanistan, but it could expand securely within Afghanistan because of the security and administrative control of their regime. It consequently produced only modest revenues inside Afghanistan, compared to today.

Since the Taliban never treated drug trafficking as a crime, and forbade poppy cultivation for only one year, the drug trade provided little or no opportunities for corruption within Afghanistan. This changed only during the year that the Taliban banned poppy cultivation (2000-2001), though they never banned trafficking. The Taliban ban, by criminalizing part of the opium economy, made the narcotics economy far more profitable –prices rose ten-fold. Though prices have declined since then, they have never returned to the competitive levels of the period when the entire drug economy was de facto legal inside Afghanistan.

The current government, however, is committed to (in the words of the preamble to the Constitution of 2004/1382) “restoring Afghanistan to its rightful place in the international community.” Hence, unlike the Taliban Emirate, the government cannot tax, regulate, or settle disputes arising from the main economic activity in the country. Instead the constitution provides:

The state shall prevent all types of terrorist activities, the production and consumption of intoxicants (musakkirat), and the production and smuggling of narcotics.

While I cannot prove it with survey data, my informal observations lead me to conclude that the social consensus in Afghanistan is that poppy cultivation and drug trafficking are wrong, but that they are inevitable and excusable (at least cultivation and small trading are) until economic alternatives develop. (I will discuss the view of the ulama in a subsequent post on interdiction and law enforcement.)

Narco-economy: the tax base for insecurity

The participants in the narcotics economy must govern this economic sector (about a third of the economy, at least half of the cash economy) through activities that are “illegal,” but that are hidden mainly from foreigners rather than other Afghans. The Afghan police and administration, political leaders, and the anti-government insurgents all offer protection services to poppy growers and drug traffickers. Competition for this lucrative role motivates much of the violence in the country. The U.S. Strategy probably overstates the relative importance of the Taliban and al-Qaida in protecting the trade and understates the degree to which the narco-economy is controlled by officials and political leaders in the Afghan government. Portraying the drug economy as primarily supporting terrorism, however, does make militaristic approaches to it seem more acceptable.

Hence the narcotics economy corrupts and weakens the government, undermines stable economic development, and funds terrorism and insurgency. It also promotes dishonesty between Afghans and foreign officials, since the former cannot tell the latter what they really think. Political insurgents, whether national or transnational, predatory officials, and illegal businessmen have a common interest in preventing consolidation of the government or rule of law. The rents from illegality provide them with the resources to undermine security, though, like the Taliban, they also use these resources to provide the local security that the drug economy needs. From the point of view of Afghan poppy cultivators, eradicators provide insecurity, and leaders (whether in the government or Taliban) who can keep eradicators out provide security. Hence poorly designed and implemented counter-narcotics policies drive many disparate forces together, though most are not ideologically committed to transnational terrorism.

On pages 13-14, the US Strategy (“Defining the Problem”) correctly diagnoses the problem as “drug money,” which “weakens key institutions and strengthens the Taliban.” But this diagnosis has consequences that the Strategy does not draw. A strategy to lessen the flow of drug money into corruption and insurgency is not identical to a strategy to reduce the quantity of addictive substances produced and exported. Once the US Strategy accurately diagnoses the problem as “drug money,” it then reverts to a nearly exclusive focus on drugs themselves, and not even on heroin, which produces much more drug money, but on poppy cultivation, which accounts for at most 20 percent of the drug economy in Afghanistan but has become the photogenic Paris Hilton of Afghan narcotics policy. This analytical flaw is the root cause of most of what I believe is wrong with this strategy.

The focus on flowers rather than drug money has led to a false comparison between northern and southern Afghanistan. U.S. officials now imply that political elites in northern Afghanistan are engaging in successful counter-narcotics, while the southern drug economy expands. This depiction has obvious ethnic implications, to the point that one government (not the U.S.) asked me to comment on whether different ethnic groups have different cultural attitudes toward opium.
The basis for these generalizations is that poppy cultivation spread into Afghanistan mainly through the Pashtun areas and that in the last year poppy cultivation has decreased in the mainly northern provinces (see the UNODC Rapid Assessment Survey map). The main reason that the drug economy expanded the most in the Pashtun areas is that traffickers shifted the cultivation to Afghanistan from Pakistan when Islamabad started to suppress it in the 1980s, and the government collapsed in Afghanistan. As a trans-border people, Pashtuns are well-organized for smuggling, whether of opium, weapons, or spare parts for trucks.

But most importantly, the map shows only the flowers. The U.S. Strategy nowhere claims, discusses, or even mentions whether “drug money” has decreased in northern Afghanistan. It has not. Balkh may be poppy-free, but its center, Mazar-i Sharif, is awash in drug money. The commanders who control Northern Afghanistan today are playing the same shell game that the Taliban did in 2000-2001. Some have suppressed cultivation (in Ghor and Bamiyan cultivation is hardly worthwhile anyway, the yields are so poor) but none have moved against trafficking. Most of them continue to profit from it, if only through what in the U.S. we would call "political contributions."

Some of the same officials who today get credit for counter-narcotics efforts are generally believed to have become millionaires directly or indirectly from drug trafficking. Recently the nephew and right-hand man of the chief of the border police in a province colored a hopeful green in the map above was caught driving a car full of heroin north through Kabul. Why? Because there is still plenty of trafficking going through the North, and trafficking, not cultivation, is where the money is. An Afghan friend (and official of the Afghan government) told me that when he was in Bamyan recently, the north-south road by the lake at Band-i Amir was crowded like a highway with trucks taking the opium and heroin of Helmand northwards. (This is the same road that the mujahidin used to transport arms from Pakistan to northern Afghanistan in the 1980s.) The same traffic goes through Ghor, to the west. The arms traffic goes in the other direction, as northern commanders sell their Iranian weapons to dealers who re-sell them to the Taliban.

The commanders have learned that we pay no attention to the money but only to bright colored flowers. And what both government officials and politically connected people tell me is, the pressure for photogenic progress comes from Congress. Every year it wants easily depicted metrics, and flowers provide it. Perhaps someone from the legislative branch would like to comment on this.

In the next installment, we will look beyond the flowers to analyze the implications of the neglected opiate value chain for counter-narcotics policy.

Afghanistan, Iraq and the Bush Administration’s Incoherent Iran Policy

Two events in the past couple of days have once again highlighted the incoherence that characterizes the Bush Administration’s policy vis-à-vis Iran: Hamid Karzai’s visit to the US and his CNN comment regarding Iran’s helpful role in Afghanistan and the third US-Iran round of talks about Iraq’s security.

Let me begin with Karzai’s comments and Bush’s response. Here are excerpts of Bush’s exchange with a reporter:

Q: President Karzai said yesterday that he believed Iran was playing a helpful role in Afghanistan. Was he able to convince you, in your meetings that that was the case, or do you still have concerns about Iran's role?

BUSH: … it's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to destabilizing force.

After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon. This is a government that's in defiance of international accord, a government that seems to be willing to thumb its nose at the international community, and at the same time a government that denies its people a rightful place in the world and denies its people the ability to realize their full potential.

So I believe that it's in the interests of all of us that we have an Iran that tries to stabilize, not destabilize; an Iran that gives up its weapons ambitions. And therefore we're working to that end.

The president knows best about what's taking place in his country. And, of course, I'm willing to listen.

But from my perspective, the burden of proof is on the Iranian government to show us that they're a positive force.

And I must tell you that this current leadership there is a -- is a big disappointment to the people of Iran.

I mean, the people of Iran could be doing a lot better than they are today. But because of the actions of this government, this country is isolated.

And we will continue to work to isolate it. Because they're not a force for good, as far as we can see. They are a destabilizing influence, wherever they are now.

The president will talk to you about Afghanistan. But I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force. And, therefore, it's going to be up to them to prove to us and prove to the government that they are.

Now I understand that George Bush’s spoken words cannot be considered a good marker for either coherence or eloquence. Nevertheless, his response is an astounding statement about how convoluted his thinking about Iran continues to be.

First of all, true to form, he begins with an outright misstatement (more accurately, a lie). The statement, “after all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon,” is an obvious untruth that like so many other untruths will probably not be challenged by the mainstream media, but through which George Bush hopes to etch in the American mind (or his own mind?!) the proven or “proclaimed” aspirations of the Iranian leadership for acquiring the bomb.

This is while the Iranian government has never articulated such a desire and in fact has repeatedly claimed, genuinely or disingenuously, the opposite. The Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons (as distinct from the pursuit of the capability to build nuclear weapons), as of today, remains a charge and assertion. The issue at hand, repeatedly described through intense European negotiations with Iran, concerns Iran’s enrichment-related programs and the fact that those programs will eventually give Iran the technological “capability” to build nuclear weapons even if Iran denies the desire to build the bomb. The point has always been that “they” cannot be trusted with the technology and not the proclaimed desire to build the bomb.

That Bush conveniently leaves out this fact, and proclaims Iran’s intention to build nuclear weapons, is not particularly surprising or revealing. Similar leaps in assertion were at work in connecting 9/11 to Saddam Hussein and in endowing Iraq with WMD. What is revealing is how the presumed Iranian aspirations for nuclear weapons are then mixed up with Iran’s other sins, including the denial of the people of Iran “to their rightful place in the world.”

In a mechanical and highly ideological fashion all of Iran’s sins are laid out to explain why Bush does not accept Karzai’s assertion that Iran is playing a helpful role in Afghanistan. Casting doubts on the words of “our man in Kabul” (and note that Karzai is no Nuri al-Maliki and no ambiguities surround the fact that he is America’s best man to run Afghanistan; no Shi’i connections can be made and he has no history of exile in Iran), Bush says, “it's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to destabilizing force,” disingenuously giving the impression that such a proof is possible for a government that is assumed to be “not a force for good.”

In the most revealing part of his answer, Bush immediately follows the sentence that blames the Iranian government for the isolation of Iran with the contradictory statement that the US “will continue to work to isolate it. Because they're not a force for good, as far as we can see. They are a destabilizing influence, wherever they are now.”

If this is not one of the clearest statements about the inability of the Bush administration to see things as they are perceived on the ground (by American allies such as Karzai), and substituting preconceived notions of good versus evil for coherent policy, I don’t know what is.

The United States and Iran have many common interests in the Middle East and adjacent areas that include some sort of stability and order in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the maintenance of Iraq's territorial integrity (an interest Iran shares with Turkey and Syria and not necessarily with other countries in the region). It is true that Tehran does not see itself obliged to help the United States in getting a handle over the mess the latter has created in Iraq and increasingly so in Afghanistan. But this is not out of the desire to bring about instability in either of the two neighboring countries, with which it shares long and conceivably insecure borders. Iran’s approach to Iraq is more due to the sheer rationality of not rushing to help (or even causing a little bit of trouble for) a superpower that identifies Iran as “not a force for good.”

This situation can be altered with a change in American foreign policy, away from reliance on pressure (and connected economic bribes if Iran gives in to political and strategic pressures) and towards an acceptance of Iran as a worthy regional player with which one can engage in serious and meaningful negotiations on a whole host of issues. But, clearly, the language used by George Bush does not reflect a desire or willingness to bring about that kind of a change. In Bush’s world, Iran ought to help improve the security situation in Iraq or Afghanistan because the US demands it; even then it is the US that will decide whether Iran has met the expectations and not on the ground realities or what the governments of Iraq or Afghanistan think or say. Furthermore, all this should be done without the US feeling any need to change or even temporarily suspend its overall hostile frame of its policies towards Iran.

Realities on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, are slowly revealing the incoherence (or impracticality) of Bush’s policies. Karzai talks about Iran’s helpful role in Afghanistan and acts accordingly while al-Maliki’s government in Iraq pleas for the continuation of US-Iran security talks before al-Maliki himself (along with his foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari) takes off for Iran in a few days for the government of Iraq’s own security talks with Iran.

It is within this context that Iran’s moves to agree with the talks with the US over Iraq must be understood. Iran is not naïve enough to think that the Bush Administration has changed its overall strategy regarding Iran. In fact, the Iranian leadership is acutely aware of the American strategy of initiating talks in the arena in which it is in most trouble (i.e., Iraq), while at the same time maintaining the language and policies of imposing as much political and economic pressure as it can muster on Iran in other areas.

Still the belief on the part of most significant players inside Iran about a unified and stable Iraq being the key to regional stability has led to a decision to engage in talks with the United States over Iraq’s security. These talks, the third of which occurred on August 6th (including ambassadorial and expert levels talks as part of a security subcommittee), are not negotiations but attempts to create an understanding about the nature of the Iran-US conflict as it is being played out in Iraq. This time around both sides considered the talks as useful, serious, and to be continued, with Iran calling for “a change in the broad policies and approach of the US in Iraq.”

From Iran's point of view, rightly or wrongly, the United States has no other choice but to eventually engage in negotiations with Iran due to historical, geographic, strategic exigencies as well as mutual interests in the region. Banking on this confidence, the Iranian leadership no longer considers talks with the US as taboo and in fact is ready to participate in multiple venues for discussions with the US even if the overall frame of hostile US policies continues. This is a significant and often neglected change in Iranian foreign policy, sanctioned by Ayatollah Khamenei. It is based on the argument that these venues of engagement will ultimately reveal the incoherence of a policy based on the notion of Iran being “not a force for good” as well allow Iran to pursue its interests in the region.

Approached in this manner, Iranian and American interests in Iraq and Afghanistan are not perceived to be necessarily in opposition and if the US can solve its problems in these two countries in ways that would allow an “honorable” exit, this is seen to be to Iran’s interest. In the words of Sadeq Kharrazi, Iran’s former ambassador to France, Iran understands that “in leaving Iraq the Americans need to save face because their humiliation may not be constructive, making the situation in the Middle East even worse than already is and forcing them to react angrily.”

There was a time in Iran, during the reformist era of Mohammad Khatami, when the Iranian leadership thought that Iran’s cooperation in Afghanistan and the negotiations over the nuclear issue would eventually open the path for a broader framework within which matters of contention between the two countries could be resolved. The Bush Administration's rejection of reformist overtures and the fiasco in Iraq set the stage for the rise of a hard-line foreign policy in Iran.

In time, however, the on the ground realities of Iraq and Afghanistan will force the US to sit down with Iran and acknowledge it as a regional player that shares many of US concerns in the region. Too bad that the beginnings of such an acknowledgment has come in a round about, almost underhanded, fashion and at a time when Iran’s foreign policy establishment is run by hardliners. One could say that hardliners in Iran could have asked for no more: an on the ground US foreign policy that is beginning to acknowledge Iran’s importance in the region, combined with an overall foreign policy frame of economic and political pressures that allow hardliners in Iran to attack domestic opponents with impunity using the pretext of American hostility.

Ryan Crocker Complains, Kazemi Qomi Waits

The second and longer meeting with Iran and the U.S. over Iraq ended with a public display of dissatisfaction on the part of Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq, about Iran’s support for the Iraqi Shi’ite militia. Meanwhile his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, has been a lot more discrete about the meeting. Talking to the Iranian press he said he was satisfied with the American “acknowledgment in the meeting that they had made many mistakes in Iraq.” He was also satisfied with the American agreement to set up a joint “security committee” to help quell the insurgency in Iraq. This was a proposal made by Qazemi Qomi to Crocker in the meeting that was held between the two in late May. Crocker, awaiting instructions from Washington, did not respond then. After two months, there seems to be a grudging acceptance that cooperation with Iran may have to be in the cards. As Juan Cole points out, this is a significant development that needs to be watched.

Given the agreement on the security committee, the details of which is supposed to be revealed in the next few days, then one has to wonder about Crocker’s critical commentary. This is particularly so if, as the Iranian website Baztab which is connected to the former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaie reports, there has been a follow up meeting between Crocker and Kazemi Qomi. According to an unidentified Iraqi official, this meeting did not include Iraqis and entailed discussion of “issues of mutual concerns between the two countries.” Baztab suggests that Crocker's critical commentary was intended to divert attention from the subsequent “private” meeting between the two emissaries.

Whether or not this interpretation is true or a subsequent meeting actually took place, the differing public posture of the two ambassadors tells me something significant about differing politics surrounding U.S./Iran relations in the two countries.

In both countries there has been quite a bit of criticism of the two meetings coming from the hard-line flanks of the two administrations. But Crocker’s public accusations after the meeting suggest that the Bush Administration is probably more concerned about the reaction to the meeting from domestic critics and regional allies. This is the only way one can explain the disconnection between Crocker's words and U.S. actions. In this context, it is worth remembering that after the first meeting in May, Crocker has specifically stated that subsequent meetings will be contingent on Iran’s behavior. If indeed, as Crocker suggests, the “on the ground” behavior of Iran has not changed since the last meeting and in fact has worsened (he said that Iran's behavior "has not been encouraging"), then why did the U.S. agree to the second meeting in the first place and even more so why the agreement over the creation of the security committee? In the post-meeting news conference, Crocker suggested that the security committee would be a framework within which Iranians could begin to address U.S. concerns about Iran's behavior in Iraq. Even if this is the only task of the security committee, which I seriously doubt, it is indeed a significant departure from Secretary Rice’s position that “Iranians already know what we expect of them” and there is no reason for any dialogue for them to act on what the U.S. expect them to do.

In Iran, on the other hand, things are working out a bit differently. The hard-line Kayhan and the presumed mouthpiece of the supreme leader has been against meetings with the U.S. from the beginning, calling them “dancing with the wolves” or an enterprise from which Iran will gain nothing and the clearly troubled Bush Administration will gain much ("why help it under such dire circumstances?"). The conservative Baztab has also criticized the lack of adequate planning and proper publicity regarding these meetings. But the decision about taking these meetings seriously seems to have been taken and hence the official discussion of these meetings have been measured and without headline grabbing accusations. Crocker’s accusations have also not been responded to in a tit-for-tat manner. Foreign Minister Mottaki even suggested that Iran would take a formal request by the United States for higher level meetings seriously, a suggestion that was immediately rejected by the Bush Administration. The Iranians seem to be banking that the realities of Iraq will force the Bush Administration to slowly come around, the same way it did with the security committee.