Bernard Kouchner, the new French foreign minister, declared in an interview about Iran on RTL Radio that “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.” His interview occurred just as the IAEA was beginning its annual General Conference. I responded publicly with a reminder that, under international law, there were rules governing the use of military force, including authorization by the Security Council. Many politicians, including the Germans and the Russians, reacted strongly to Kouchner’s statement, and he took hasty action to retract what he had said.[19]
After all the commotion over the work plan, in late September the P-5+1 endorsed it, urging Iran “to produce tangible results rapidly and effectively by clarifying all outstanding issues and concerns.” The Chinese and the Russians had already made clear their support for the plan. I was told that the EU-3 had cautioned the United States that attacking the Agency was counterproductive and could backfire.
For whatever reason, the Americans abruptly reversed their hostile position. Only one week earlier, Condoleezza Rice had taken a swipe at the Agency and, by implication, me.[20] “The IAEA is not in the business of diplomacy,” she declared. “The IAEA is a technical agency that has a board of governors of which the United States is a member.” Now, in quite a diplomatic about-face, Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, when asked about U.S. criticism of the plan, implied that the Americans had supported it all along.
The complicated political maneuvering in both Washington and Tehran made progress challenging. When I continued to urge the Iranians not to expand their enrichment capacity beyond three thousand centrifuges and pushed for them to implement the Additional Protocol, Larijani said, “I am doing my best, but you must understand that I am working in a difficult atmosphere.” Even with a firsthand view, it was hard to understand the dynamics of the Iranian political situation. The slow-moving, diffuse decision-making structure, added to what seemed like a negotiating culture shaped by the bazaar, made the Iranians inherently difficult to deal with.
The American side was no less opaque. The strategy of dogged repetition, in the absence of any proof, of the argument that Iran intended to produce nuclear weapons seemed to convince the American public, and even the U.S. Congress—and at times the Americans seemed baffled or angry that it failed to convince much of the rest of the international community. Late in 2007, I had an intelligence briefing at the U.S. Mission. Among other topics the Americans went over their suspicions that Iran, at least in the past, had conducted certain experiments and procured certain equipment and components that could only be interpreted as an indication of their intent to develop nuclear weapons.[21] However, they did acknowledge—as in most previous intelligence briefings—that there was no indication that Iran had undeclared nuclear material. After the Iraq debacle, the U.S. intelligence community had become more circumspect in its assessments. The briefing essentially confirmed what I had been saying, yet this caution somehow did not shape the American public posture.
At the end of this particular meeting, Schulte presented a signed picture of me and Rice, taken at our most recent meeting. She had signed it “With admiration and best regards.” It struck me as funny, coming on the heels of a public spat. But the act illustrated the contradictory and fractured nature of the American Iran policy.
Concurrent with my fall United States intelligence briefing, Bush made a series of outlandish comments on the Iran situation. A speech to the American Legion in Reno was punctuated with inflammatory imagery: “Iran’s 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.”[22] In an October 17 press conference, he remarked, “I’ve told people that, if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [the Iranians] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”[23] Speaking on a German news channel on November 14, he casually lobbed another verbal grenade: “If you want to have a Third World War,” he quipped, “you need only drop a nuclear bomb on Israel.”[24] I didn’t know whether the purpose of these statements was to ratchet up the pressure against Iran or to prepare the ground for a military strike, but either way, they were reckless, and disturbingly reminiscent of early 2003.[25]
Yet Rice, at around the same time, made remarks that seemed designed to lower the pitch. “The way forward,” she told RTR TV Moscow, “is to give every chance and support to the efforts of Mohamed ElBaradei to resolve outstanding issues on Iran’s programs.”
Wait. Had I just heard that correctly? Rice continued: “It is not a question of whether Iran has a nuclear weapon today. It is a question of enrichment and reprocessing capability, the so-called fuel cycle.”
I tried to find a coherent thread. On the one hand, the Iranian nuclear risk had been characterized as lower than previously thought—no longer a matter of Iran’s imminent possession of a nuclear weapon, but in terms of its future intention. On the other, the Security Council had invoked the grimmest chapter in the UN Charter, and Bush was all but ready to pull out his six-guns and begin firing. Meanwhile, a continent away, North Korea, who was raising a generation of children debilitated by malnutrition and diverting every ounce of effort to pull off a successful nuclear test, was being handled with kid gloves.
A handful of concerned American senators and congressmen continued on another track to attempt to maintain some dialogue with Iran. Senator Arlen Specter, still a Republican at that time, contacted me a number of times to facilitate a visit to Tehran.[26]
The last such request came after Ahmadinejad was given a humiliating reception at Columbia University in September 2007.[27] Specter was very upset about what had occurred. “You don’t invite a guest to insult him,” he said. He wanted to arrange a visit for seven senators and congressmen, including Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, and Tom Lantos. As in any such case, I passed the word to Larijani, urging Tehran to respond positively, as a foot in the door toward dialogue. But the trip did not go forward; the Iranian leadership was in no mood to accept a visit from American public figures.
This period was marked overall by contradictory, haphazard stabs at engagement and, in the now-usual way of the Iranian file, a pattern of doors opening and closing. In mid-October, the French political director Gérard Araud came to see me at the request of Bernard Kouchner. I did not know what to expect, given recent statements by Kouchner and President Sarkozy, who had said that if diplomacy failed, we would be “faced with an alternative that I call catastrophic: an Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran.”[28]
Araud’s tone and views, however, were surprisingly positive. The French were eager to work closely with me on any initiative that could return the focus to negotiations between Iran and the P-5+1, he said. Kouchner was keen to invite me to come to Paris. In their view, Iran was feeling self-assured and seemed to be planning to wait out the Bush administration. The French, however, were still worried about possible U.S. military action against Iran in the spring or summer of 2008, before Bush left office.
19
Katrin Bennhold and Elaine Sciolino, “After Talk of War, Cooler Words in France on Iran,”
20
Sue Pleming, “Rice Swipes at IAEA, Urges Bold Action on Iran,” Reuters, September 17, 2007.
21
In late 2005, the United States had first briefed the IAEA on a package of information they had received claiming nuclear weaponization studies by Iran related to uranium conversion, high explosives testing, and modification of Shihab-3 missiles to carry a nuclear weapon. Iran had called these allegations baseless, and since the United States had restricted giving the IAEA documentation on this topic to share with Tehran, the Agency had been limited in its ability to verify the information.
23
“Bush Warns of ‘World War III’ if Iran Gains Nuclear Weapons,” Associated Press, October 18, 2007. Retrieved at www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,303097,00.html.
24
“German TV Interview: U.S. President Repeats ‘Third World War’ Warning,” November 14, 2007. Retrieved at www.world-peace-society.net/eecore/index.php?/site/C78/.
25
Seymour Hersh would report that in late 2007 Bush was lobbying the Congress for up to four hundred million dollars to support covert operations in Iran, in activities “designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.” “Preparing the Battlefield,”
26
Gareth Evans, the head of the International Crisis Group and former Australian foreign minister, requested my assistance for a similar venture.
27
Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs as part of its annual World Leaders Forum. When he arrived, he was greeted with thousands of demonstrators, and university president Lee Bollinger introduced him with a harsh series of criticisms about Ahmadinejad’s political views, which bordered on personal insult.
28
Elaine Sciolino, “Iran Risks Attack over Atomic Push, French President Says,”