Iraq and Iran: Same Difference?

Interesting perspective on the similiarities and dissimilarities of Iraq and Iran:

From: The New York Times
Date: June 4, 2006
Title: It's Just Like Iraq, Only Different
Author: HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON
DOES this sound familiar? The Bush administration, after months of hinting that it is considering military options to rid a certain oil-producing Middle Eastern country whose name begins with "I" of its alleged weapons program, says that it's willing to try diplomacy.
Publicly, American officials say the offer shows the United States is keen to work with other countries diplomatically to resolve the crisis. But it soon starts to look as if the public diplomacy is just a way for American officials to say they have exhausted all options and tried to play nice. In reality, American officials had already begun planning for war.
That was the chain of events playing out on Sept. 12, 2002, when President Bush, in a speech to the United Nations, committed himself to seeking an international consensus on confronting Saddam Hussein. "My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge," Mr. Bush said, calming fears that the United States would bypass the United Nations. As it turned out, that's exactly what Washington did six months later when it went to war in Iraq without the United Nations behind it.
For a lot of critics of President Bush's handling of Saddam Hussein, the announcement Wednesday that the United States is willing to join Europeans in talks with Iran over its nuclear program, provided Tehran suspends its uranium activities, was like a recurring dream:
Was the administration again using public diplomacy for political cover while preparing to use military force?
This time, all signs say no.
The world of June 2006 is fundamentally different from that of September 2002, just one year after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Back then, the United States was fresh from toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, in a war viewed sympathetically at home and in many other countries.
And while a connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein was never proved, there was widespread belief that the Bush administration was correct in its determination that Mr. Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction. After a wave of anthrax attacks in the United States, the idea of ridding Iraq of chemical and biological weapons seemed a noble one. And President Bush's domestic approval rating was at 69 percent.
Fast forward to today. Thanks to the botched intelligence on Iraq's weapons program, it would be harder to rally a coalition of the willing, let alone the United Nations, for military strikes against Iran.
American troops are stretched, and polls show that most Americans think the war in Iraq is going badly.
Iran has vastly different options and resources than Iraq did. If attacked, it could retaliate in Iraq, for instance, given its close ties to Shiites who now hold power there.
But even if the military option isn't palatable to the United States and its allies now, neither is the idea of living with an Iran with nuclear weapons. If Iran gets closer to acquiring — or acquires — a bomb, policy makers could one day be tempted to think that a military clash is worth risking.
But that point hasn't been reached yet.
"The U.S. doesn't have the stomach for military invasion, and the world community is not going to stand by this time," said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University.
James B. Steinberg, who was deputy national security adviser under President Clinton, said that this time Bush administration officials "recognize they don't have a lot of unilateral options."
Mr. Steinberg and Mr. Milani praised the administration move toward Iran, saying it puts the United States in a good position no matter how Iran responds.
Iran says its uranium enrichment activity is peaceful, and it is technically correct in saying that such activity is allowed under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Last week, Iranian officials reiterated that their nuclear program is a sovereignty issue.
The initiative agreed to late Thursday by the United States and five major powers offers incentives if Iran suspends its pursuit of nuclear activities. But even if Iran declines the administration's offer, the United States, by making it, has broken the Security Council impasse and pushed the United Nations closer to coercive measures.
Such an outcome might not surprise the Americans, since there is at least one similarity to the events leading up to the Iraq war: American officials start out pessimistic about what can come from talks with a deceptive and mendacious adversary.
But even if this initiative proves to be a feint that only shows up the Iranians' bad faith, instead of resolving the crisis, the consequences would presumably be very different than they were with Iraq: sanctions by a united group of allies this time, rather than a war that splits American alliances.
Diplomats and analysts say that if Iran rejects the package, the United States would be in a better position to argue for sanctions. Indeed, the American move is as much directed toward the rest of the world as Iran, reflecting another lesson from the Iraq war, when the United States was accused of ignoring advice from allies and foes alike.
On Wednesday, for example, before they announced their new willingness to negotiate with Iran, senior administration officials telephoned a handful of academics and opinion makers, including Democrats, to talk through the new Iran strategy with them.

From: The New York Times
Date: June 4, 2006
Title: A Talk at Lunch That Shifted the Stance on Iran
Author: HELENE COOPER and David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON, June 3 — On a Tuesday afternoon two months ago, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat down to a small lunch in President Bush's private dining room behind the Oval Office and delivered grim news to her boss: Their coalition against Iran was at risk of falling apart.
A meeting she had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation "that said, 'O.K., team, what's the answer?' "
That body language touched off a closely held two-month effort to reach a drastically different strategy, one articulated two weeks later in a single sentence that Ms. Rice wrote in a private memorandum. It broached the idea that the United States end its nearly three-decade policy against direct talks with Iran.
Mr. Bush's aides rarely describe policy debates in the Oval Office in much detail. But in recounting his decisions in this case, they appeared eager to portray him as determined to rebuild a fractured coalition still bearing scars from Iraq and find a way out of a negotiating dynamic that, as one aide said recently, "the Iranians were winning."
Mr. Bush gradually grew more comfortable with offering talks to a country that he considers the No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, and whose president has advocated wiping Israel off the map. Mr. Bush's own early misgivings about the path he was considering came in a flurry of phone calls to Ms. Rice and to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, that often began with questions like "What if the Iranians do this," gaming out loud a number of possible situations.
Mr. Bush left open the option of scuttling the entire idea until early Wednesday morning, three senior officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were describing internal debates in the White House. He made the final decision only after telephone calls with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany led him to conclude that if Tehran refused to suspend its enrichment of uranium, or later dragged its feet, they would support an escalating series of sanctions against Iran at the United Nations that could lead to a confrontation.
Even after Mr. Bush edited the statement that Ms. Rice was scheduled to read Wednesday before she flew to Vienna to encourage Europe and Russia to sign on to a final package of incentives for Iran — and sanctions if it turns the offer down — Ms. Rice wanted to check in one more time. She called Mr. Bush. Was he sure he was O.K. with his decision?
"Go do it," he was said to have responded.
She did, but the results remain unclear. Iran has given no indication it will agree to Mr. Bush's threshold condition, suspending nuclear fuel production. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Friday that he would oppose "any pressure to deprive our people from their right" to pursue a peaceful nuclear program.
The official news agency IRNA reported that Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said Saturday that Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, was expected to arrive in Tehran in the next few days with the new package of incentives.
"Iran will examine the proposal and announce its opinion after that," Mr. Mottaki said. Mr. Bush's aides now acknowledge that the approach they had once publicly described as successfully "isolating" Iran was in fact viewed internally as going nowhere. Mr. Bush's search for a new option was driven, they say, by concern that the path he was on two months ago would inevitably force one of two potentially disastrous outcomes: an Iranian bomb, or an American attack on Iran's facilities.
Conservatives, even some inside the administration, are worried that Mr. Bush may be forced into other concessions, including allowing Iran to continue some low level of nuclear fuel production. Others fear that the commitments Mr. Bush believes he extracted from Mr. Putin, Ms. Merkel and President Jacques Chirac of France may erode.
But the story of how a president who rarely changes his mind did so in this case — after refusing similar proposals on Iran four years ago — illustrates the changed dynamic between the State Department and the White House in Mr. Bush's second term. When Colin L. Powell was secretary of state, the two buildings often seemed at war. But 18 months after Ms. Rice took over, her relationship with Mr. Bush has led to policies that one former adviser to Ms. Rice and Mr. Bush said "he never would have allowed Colin to pursue."
It is unclear how much dissent, if any, surrounded the decision, which appears to have been driven largely by the president, Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley, with other senior national security officials playing a more remote role. Both White House and State Department officials say Vice President Dick Cheney, long an opponent of proposals to engage Iran, agreed to this experiment. But it is unclear whether he is an enthusiast, or simply expects Iran to reject suspending enrichment — clearing the way to sanctions that could test the Iranian government's ability to survive.
After the surprise election of Mr. Ahmadinejad last summer, Iran ended its suspension of uranium enrichment, and the United States and Europe won resolutions at the International Atomic Energy Agency to move the issue to the United Nations Security Council. But it took weeks over the winter to get the weakest of Security Council actions — a "presidential statement." Russia, which has huge financial interests in Iran and is supplying it with nuclear reactors, was particularly reluctant to push the Iranians too hard.
At a private dinner on March 6 at the Watergate with Ms. Rice, Mr. Hadley and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Mr. Lavrov warned that Iran could do what North Korea did in 2003 — throw out inspectors and abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That would close the biggest window into Iran's program, making it hard to assess its bomb capability — the same issue that had led to huge errors in Iraq.
On March 30, Ms. Rice traveled to Berlin for what turned into a fractious meeting with representatives of the other four permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. She questioned what kind of sanctions would be effective. The conversation went nowhere.
That led to Ms. Rice's warning to Mr. Bush over lunch, on April 4, that the momentum to confront Iran was disintegrating. Mr. Bush, one aide noted, was receiving special intelligence assessments every morning, some on Iran's intentions, others examining Mr. Ahmadinejad's personality, still others exploring how long it would take Iran to produce a bomb.
On Easter weekend, Ms. Rice sat in her apartment and drafted a two-page proposal for a new strategy that pursued three tracks: the threat of "coercive measures" through the United Nations, negotiations with Iran that included what Ms. Rice has called "bold" incentives for Iran to give up the production of all nuclear fuel and a separate set of strategies for economic sanctions if the Security Council failed to act.
They were accompanied by a calendar Ms. Rice had marked in three colors tracking the schedule for each of the three tracks, which Mr. Hadley told her was "brilliant, colorful, and completely impenetrable."
For the first time, her proposal also raised a question the administration had long avoided: Had the time arrived for the United States to play what she and Mr. Bush, both bridge players, called their biggest card — offering to talk with Iran? She shared the proposal with Mr. Hadley, and then raised it with Mr. Bush in private on May 5
The idea intrigued Mr. Bush, White House officials say, and on May 8, Ms. Rice met with him just hours before flying to New York for a meeting with her European counterparts.
She asked him what kind of body language to display at the United Nations meeting. Should she signal that the United States was considering negotiations with Iran? "Be careful," he said, according to officials familiar with the conversation. "I haven't made up my mind."
That same day, an 18-page letter from Mr. Ahmadinejad arrived. It declared liberal democracy a failure, although it also was perceived by many as an effort to reach out and start a dialogue.
Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley read the letter on the flight to New York, but dismissed it. "It isn't addressing the issues we're dealing with in a concrete way," Ms. Rice said that day.
Her meeting in New York with her European counterparts turned testy, particularly an exchange with Mr. Lavrov, who was still smarting from a speech by Mr. Cheney denouncing Russia for its increasingly authoritarian behavior. But the discussion, while fractious, convinced her that the only way to break the stalemate was to offer to join the negotiations.
While Mr. Bush was intrigued, he was intent on secrecy, and so when the National Security Council met on the subject on May 17, he warned against leaks. The session was notable because Mr. Cheney, who had fought in the first term against engagement with Iran, said the offer might work, largely because it would force the choices back on Iran. And while the council had dismissed the letter, it used the meeting to discuss whether to respond.
While Mr. Bush initially told Ms. Rice that others could work out the final negotiations, Ms. Rice told the president that "only you can nail this down," apparently a reference to keeping Ms. Merkel and Mr. Putin on board. Mr. Bush made the calls and got them to agree that if Iran resists, they will move ahead with a range of sanctions.
But Mr. Bush, led by Ms. Rice, is taking a significant risk. He must hold together countries that bitterly broke with the United States three years ago on Iraq. And now, he seems acutely aware that part of his legacy may depend on his ability to prevent Iran from emerging as a nuclear power in the Middle East, without again resorting to military force.