WASHINGTON (UPI) – The mood music from Tehran on the eve of the long-awaited bilateral meeting with the United States Monday could hardly have been more discordant. The reality was almost as bad.
The talks Monday between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi (which also included Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari) were officially meant to cover only matters of internal security in Iraq. According to U.S. diplomatic sources, Crocker intended to raise Iran’s support for militant groups and supplying them with weapons, as well as Iranian interference in the political process in Iraq.
Crocker did so, with little effect, and dismissed the Iranian proposal to establish a Council of Three, Iran, Iraq and the United States, for ongoing security discussions. He also made it clear that the United States did not find helpful the other Iranian proposal, to strengthen the current Iraqi government with Iranian arms and training.
To sweeten the atmosphere, the United States last week announced that its Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group had been disbanded. This inter-agency task force, which included the CIA as well as the U.S. Treasury and State Department, coordinated attempts to isolate Syria and Iran, to disrupt their access to the international banking system, and to pressure the regimes to reform or change.
The group met weekly throughout last year and at least until March of this year in conditions of some secrecy, and was modeled on a similar group that coordinated actions to bring pressure on Iraq before the 2003 war.
It was thus seen by Damascus and Tehran as an attempt to destabilize their societies and to bring about regime change through “soft” subversion. Those suspicions were reinforced by the recent ABC-TV news reports that the United States was covertly supporting anti-Tehran Baluchi rebels in eastern Iran, close to the Pakistani border.
So it should not have come as a great surprise that Iran’s Intelligence Ministry last week announced that it had “succeeded in identifying and striking blows at several spy networks comprised of infiltrating elements from the Iraqi occupiers in western, southwestern and central Iran.”
“These spy networks were operating under the guidance of the occupiers’ intelligence services and with the support of some influential Iraqi groups and factions,” the statement, broadcast on Iranian state TV, went on.
Most ominously for the U.S-Iran talks, Tehran’s Intelligence Ministry related this supposed U.S. plan to subvert the regime to the arrest of the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiary, who directs the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. (Interest declared: This reporter is a senior scholar of that same institution and Haleh is a friend as well as a colleague.) Haleh is one of five Western-based scholars and NGO officials who have now been detained.
“In primary interrogations, she (Haleh) reiterated that Soros Foundation has established an unofficial network with the potential of future broader expansion, whose main objective is overthrowing the system,” the Intelligence Ministry said. (All quotations come from the official IRNA news agency report.)
“According to those elaborations, some of those foundations send invitations to Iranian thinkers to give lectures, participate at seminars, or to present research projects, allocating budgets to such activities … trying to choose active partners in our country and link them to the decision maker circles and organization in the United States. In this respect the unseen key role played by certain intelligence agents and undercover officials in pushing forth the objectives of such projects is to be noted.”
“Although the short term objectives of the above mentioned foundations are mainly linked to their apparent activities, their mid-term objectives include a type of culture making, foundation making, and network establishment in the country, and their expansion in the long run, that is seriously pursued,” the Intelligence Ministry said, citing parallels with the work of western-backed NGOs in the Rose revolution in Georgia and the Orange revolution in Ukraine.
“The ultimate goal of those foundations, too, is to fortify those networks at fields that are of interest for them and reaping the fruits of such activities in due time, that is nothing but people’s confrontation with the system. This U.S. designed model is aimed at soft overthrowing of the system.”
The Iranians, it should be recalled, have assumed since they were listed by President Bush in 2002 as a charter member of the “axis of evil” that they were targets for regime change. So the overall prospects from the Iranian side did not look promising for Monday’s talks.
And while the United States has made the significant gesture of disbanding the Iran-Syria Policy and Operations Group, the Iranians are looking at other aspects of U.S. policy, including the deployment in the Persian Gulf for “war games” of two aircraft carrier task forces, with 17,000 personnel aboard and 140 aircraft.
The Iranians are assumed by U.S. policy-makers to be divided between the hard-liners of the Intelligence Ministry, the Revolutionary Guards and the nuclear program officials, and the more reasonable moderates in the Foreign and Economic ministries. The U.S. strategy of talks and war games, or hard cop and soft cop approach, is thus aimed at exploiting the differences between hard-liners and moderates.
But the Iranians see a similar split in the Bush administration, between the moderates at the State Department and in Congress, and the hard-liners around Vice-President Cheney and in the Pentagon. The Iranians in turn seek to exploit those differences, just as they seek to exploit differences between the United States and its European allies, and between them and the Russians and Chinese on the United Nations Security Council.
In the meantime, according to the international Atomic Energy Agency, Iran now has 1,300 centrifuges running in cascade a the Natanz plant to produce nuclear fuel, allegedly for a nuclear power stations that has yet to be completed.
And Natanz is now well protected. In January this year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov announced that Russia had completed the delivery of Tor-M1 anti-aircraft missiles to Iran in an estimated $1.4 billion deal. Ivanov stressed that the missiles were “100 percent defensive weapons” and that Russia did not violate any international agreements by selling them, adding “if Iran needs other defensive armaments, we are ready to cooperate.”
Iran’s hard-liners thus feel somewhat more secure and somewhat less ready for a compromise, even if Monday’s talks failed to overcome the ominous mood music and find some common ground that could help resolve this worsening crisis. The only good news from this long-awaited encounter was that at least the two sides are talking. And there are many in Tehran and in Washington who have their doubts about even that.
