Ahmadinejad, Bush, and the avoidance of war
Veteran Washington (now WaPo) columnist David Ignatius is, as I've written here numerous times before, a savvy and very well-connected journo. Within the past three weeks he has: (1) made a ten-day tour to Iran, (2) participated in a significant, if quirky, little conference on the problems of empire convened in Venice by some very well-connected Washington "paleo-conservatives", (3) conducted a one-on-one interview with Pres. Bush, and (4) participated in a two-on-one interview in New York with Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In this latter interview, David was accompanied by diva-ish WaPo "First Sister" Lally Weymouth, whose transcript of the interview is here. (See Scott's commentary on that interview, here.) Equally as interesting as the straight content of that interview is David's very well-informed judgment of the historical moment it represents:
- The most telling moment in a conversation here last week with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came when he was asked if America would attack Iran. He quickly answered "no," with a slight cock of his head as if he regarded the very idea of war between the two countries as preposterous.
Ahmadinejad's confidence was the overriding theme of his visit. He was like a picador, deftly sticking darts into a wounded bull...
Over the course of a week's time, I had an unusual chance to sit with both President Bush and President Ahmadinejad and hear their thoughts about Iran. The contrasts were striking: Bush is groping for answers to the Iran problem; you sense him struggling for a viable strategy. When I asked what message he wanted to send the Iranian people, Bush seemed eager for more contact: He spoke of Iran's importance, of its great history and culture, of its legitimate rights. He made similar comments in his speech Tuesday to the U.N. General Assembly.
Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, is sitting back and enjoying the attention. He's not groping for anything; he's waiting for the world to come to him. When you boil down his comments, the message is similar to Bush's: Iran wants a diplomatic solution to the nuclear impasse; Iran wants dialogue; Iran wants more cultural exchanges. At one point, Ahmadinejad even said that "under fair conditions," he would favor a resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States.
But if the words of accommodation are there, the music is not. Instead of sending a message to the administration that he is serious about negotiations, Ahmadinejad spent the week playing to the gallery of Third World activists and Muslim revolutionaries with his comments about Israel and the Holocaust. This audience hears the defiant message between the lines: America cannot do a damn thing.
Ahmadinejad is the calmest revolutionary I've ever seen. Sitting in a plush easy chair in his suite at the InterContinental hotel, he barely moves a muscle as he makes the most radical statements. His feet don't jiggle, his hands don't make gestures, his facial expression barely changes. His eyes are the most expressive part of his body -- sparkling one moment, glowering the next, focusing down to dark points when he is angry.
An interview with Ahmadinejad is an intellectual ping-pong match. He bounces back each question with one of his own: Ask about Hezbollah's attacks, and he asks about Israel's attacks. Question his defiance of the United Nations, and he shifts to America's defiance of the world body. In more than an hour of conversation with me and Lally Weymouth of Newsweek, he didn't deviate from his script. Indeed, some of his comments in the interview were repeated almost word for word when he addressed the General Assembly a few hours later. This is a man adept at message control.
The common strand I take away from this week of Iranian-American conversation is that the two countries agree on one central fact: Iran is a powerful nation that should play an important role in the international system..
That's the challenge: Can America and Iran find a formula that will meet each side's security interests, and thereby allow Iran to return fully to the community of nations after 27 years? Iran can't achieve its ambitions as a rising power without an accommodation with America. America can't achieve its interest in stabilizing the Middle East without help from Iran. The potential for war is there, but so is the bedrock of mutual self-interest. The simple fact is that these two countries need each other.
Why do I say this? Because for all the rhetorical barbs he launched while in New York this week, Ahmadinejad was also very careful to express himself in a measured, calculated way when it came to the central core of the issue: the possibility of a real opening with Washington. For example, in the interview with Ignatius and Weymouth, he started off, in the first answer, saying that "the US administration" (does not create the right circumstances for negotiations) but immediately self-corrected that to say, "that is, a section of the U.S. administration -- does not create the right circumstances. It destroys chances for constructive talks." And later, he said, "Some politicians in the United States think that the nuclear issue is a way to put pressure on Iran."
As David noted, this is a man who knows how to stay "on message". And the message he is on now seems clearly to be one that seeks not to demonize the entire current US administration but to leave the way open to empowering any voices within it that might be ready to open a serious negotiation with Teheran.
That, and the relative calm and circumspection with which Ahmadinejad responded to, for example, Weymouth's questions on Israel and the Holocaust indicate to me that the Superme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has now gotten Ahmadinejad sufficiently on board his more moderate diplomatic project that at least Ahmadinejad's performance while in New York has not torpedoed (and may perhaps have helped?) Khamenei's project.
While in New York Ahmadinejad also held a couple of other significant meetings with Americans. One was the very controversial meeting with the ultra-Establishment-oriented "Council on Foreign Relations". Another was with a group of 50 non-governmental people convened by the Mennonite Central Committee. (More on this in a later post.)
Many of the attendees at the CFR meeting were later quoted as saying that his performance there had shown that Ahmadinejad was "impossible" to deal with-- though at least one experienced diplomatist responded to those utterances by saying that they just showed how out of practice most Americans have become at the fine art of diplomacy over the years in which the US has been able to act as a largely unchallenged hegemonic power...
It looks, though, in general as if Ahmadinejad's visit has kept the opening provided by former Pres. Khatami's recent visit here at least wide enough open for some form of serious, de-escalatory communication to proceed. As I noted in this recent CSM column, that should at the very least include some kind of an inter-military hot-line system down there in the Gulf. But beyond that, there certainly need to be conflict-resolving talks on a wide range of issues including the modalities of a US withdrawal from Iraq, the American concerns about Iran's nuclear program, and other outstanding regional issues.
Meanwhile, the US Navy is also proceeding on the parallel track of preparing an entire additional carrier battle group to leave Virginia to sail toward Iran. It is time to get the US-Iran diplomacy started.