Claeskrantz.se

Värd att läsa i sin helhet för de

som läser engelska. Visar om inte annat hur ‘true belivers’ i vita huset gång på gång sagt nej till förhandlingar med Iran och till

otaliga fredsförslag från olika arabstater när det gäller Israel-Palestina. Intressant är även Israels roll i den amerikanska

mellanöstern politiken. När Sharon sade nej var detta också ett nej från Bush administrationen. Vice-president Cheney och Rumsfeld

framgår också som de verkliga arkitekterna bakom Bush administrationens utrikespolitik.

src="http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/iran-1-1107-lg.jpg" alt="Two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush

Adminstration say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise. It'll be Iraq all over

again." />

Print The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran

That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know

At 5:30 a.m. on September 12, they walked the list to the office

of
the deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage. Powell took it
straight to the White House.

Mann and Leverett didn’t

know each other then, but they were already
traveling down parallel tracks. Months before September 11, Mann had
been negotiating

with the Iranian diplomat at the UN. After the
attacks, the meetings continued, sometimes alone and sometimes with
their Russian

counterpart sitting in. Soon they traded the conference
room for the Delegates’ Lounge, an airy two-story bar with ashtrays

for
all the foreigners who were used to smoking indoors. One day, up on the
second floor where the windows overlooked the East

River, the diplomat
told her that Iran was ready to cooperate unconditionally, a phrase
that had seismic diplomatic implications.

Unconditional talks are what
the U.S. had been demanding as a precondition to any official
diplomatic contact between the U.S. and

Iran. And it would be the first
chance since the Islamic revolution for any kind of rapprochement. ”It
was revolutionary,” Mann

says. ”It could have changed the world.”

A few weeks later, after signing on to Condoleezza Rice’s staff as
the new Iran

expert in the National Security Council, Mann flew to
Europe with Ryan Crocker — then a deputy assistant secretary of state
– to

hold talks with a team of Iranian diplomats. Meeting in a
light-filled conference room at the old UN building in Geneva,

they
hammered out plans for Iranian help in the war against the Taliban. The
Iranians agreed to provide assistance if any American

was shot down
near their territory, agreed to let the U.S. send food in through their
border, and even agreed to restrain some

”really bad Afghanis,” like a
rabidly anti-American warlord named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, quietly
putting him under house arrest in

Tehran. These were significant
concessions. At the same time, special envoy James Dobbins was having
very public and warm

discussions in Bonn with the Iranian deputy
foreign minister as they worked together to set up a new government for
Afghanistan.

And the Iranians seemed eager to help in more tactical
ways as well. They had intimate knowledge of Taliban strategic
capabilities

and they wanted to share it with the Americans.

One day during the U.S. bombing campaign, Mann and her

Iranian
counterparts were sitting around the wooden conference table
speculating about the future Afghani constitution. Suddenly

the Iranian
who knew so much about intelligence matters started pounding on the
table. ”Enough of that!” he shouted, unfurling a

map of Afghanistan.
Here was a place the Americans needed to bomb. And here, and here, he angrily jabbed his finger

at the map.

Leverett spent those days in his office at the State Department
building, watching the revolution in the Middle

East and coming up with
plans on how to capture the lightning. Suddenly countries like Syria
and Libya and Sudan and Iran were

coming forward with offers of help,
which raised a vital question — should they stay on the same enemies
list as North Korea and

Iraq, or could there be a new slot for
”friendly” sponsors of terror?

As a CIA analyst, Leverett had come to the view

that Middle Eastern
terrorism was more tactical than religious. Syria wanted the Golan
Heights back and didn’t have the military

strength to put up a serious
fight against Israel, so it relied on ”asymmetrical methods.” Accepting
this idea meant that nations

like Syria weren’t locked in a fanatic
mind-set, that they could evolve to use new methods, so Leverett told
Powell to seize the

moment and draw up a ”road map” to peace for the
problem countries of the Middle East — expel your terrorist groups and
stop

trying to develop weapons of mass destruction, and we will take
you off the sponsors-of-terrorism list and start a new era

of
cooperation.

That December, just after the triumph over Afghanistan, Powell took
the idea to the White House.

The occasion was the regular ”deputies
meeting” at the Situation Room. Gathered around the table were the
deputy secretary of

state, the deputy secretary of defense, the deputy
director of the CIA, a representative from Vice-President Cheney’s
office, and

also the deputy national security advisor, Stephen Hadley.

Hadley hated the idea. So did the representatives from Rumsfeld

and
Cheney. They thought that it was a reward for bad behavior, that the
sponsors of terrorism should stop just because it’s the

right thing to
do.

After the meeting, Hadley wrote up a brief memo that came to be known as Hadley’s Rules:

If a

state like Syria or Iran offers specific assistance, we will
take it without offering anything in return. We will accept it

without
strings or promises. We won’t try to build on it.

Leverett thought that was simply nutty. To strike postures of

moral
purity, they were throwing away a chance for real progress. But just a
few days later, Condoleezza Rice called him into her

office, warming
him up with talk of how classical music shaped their childhoods. As he
told her about the year he spent studying

classical piano at the Liszt
Academy in Budapest, Leverett felt a real connection. Then she said she
was looking for someone to

take the job of senior director of Mideast
affairs at the National Security Council, someone who would take a real
leadership role

on the Palestinian issue. Big changes were coming in
2002.

He repeated his firm belief that the White House had to draw up

a
road map with real solutions to the division of Jerusalem and the
problem of refugees, something with final borders. That was

the only
remedy to the crisis in the Middle East.

Just after the New Year, Rice called and offered him the job.

The

bowl of grapes is empty and the plate of cheese moves to
the center of the table. Leverett’s teenage son comes in with

questions
about a teacher. Periodically, Mann interrupts herself. ”This is off
the record,” she says. ”This is going to have to be

on background.”

She’s not allowed to talk about confidential documents or
intelligence matters, but the topic of her

negotiations with the
Iranians is especially touchy.

”As far as they’re concerned, the whole idea that there were talks is

something I shouldn’t even be talking about,” she says.

All ranks and ranking are out. ”They don’t want there to be anything

about the level of the talks or who was involved.”

”They won’t even let us say something like ’senior’ or ‘important,’

‘high-ranking,’ or ‘high-level,’ ” Leverett says.

But the important thing is that the Iranians agreed to

talk
unconditionally, Mann says. ”They specifically told me time and again
that they were doing this because they understood the

impact of this
attack on the U.S., and they thought that if they helped us
unconditionally, that would be the way to change the

dynamic for the
first time in twenty-five years.”

She believed them.

But while Leverett was still moving into

the Old Executive Office
Building next to the White House, Mann was wrapped up in the crisis
over a ship called the Karin

A that left Iran loaded with fifty tons of weapons. According to the Israeli navy, which intercepted the Karin A in
the

Red Sea, it was headed for the PLO. In staff meetings at the White
House, Mann argued for caution. The Iranian government probably

didn’t
even know about the arms shipments. It was issuing official denials in
the most passionate way, even sending its deputy

foreign minister onto
Fox News to say ”categorically” that ”all segments of the Iranian
government” had nothing to do with the

arms shipment, which meant the
”total government, not simply President Khatami’s administration.”

Bush

waited. Three weeks later, it was time for his 2002 State of
the Union address. Mann spent the morning in a meeting with

Condoleezza
Rice and the new president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, who kept
asking Rice for an expanded international

peacekeeping force. Rice kept
saying that the Afghans would have to solve their own problems. Then
they went off to join the

president’s motorcade and Mann headed back to
her office to watch the speech on TV.

That was the speech in

which Bush linked Iran to Iraq and North Korea with a memorable phrase:

”States like these, and their terrorist

allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.”

The Iranians had been engaging

in high-level diplomacy with the
American government for more than a year, so the phrase was shocking
and profound.

After that, the Iranian diplomats skipped the monthly meeting in
Geneva. But they came again in March. And

so did Mann. ”They said they
had put their necks out to talk to us and they were taking big risks
with their careers and their

families and their lives,” Mann says.

The secret negotiations with Iran continued, every month for another

year.

Leverett plunged right into a dramatic new peace proposal floated by
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Calling for

”full normalization”
in exchange for ”full withdrawal” from the occupied territories,
Abdullah promised to rally all the Arab

nations to a final settlement
with Israel. In his brand-new third-floor office at the Old Executive
Office Building, a tiny room

with a very high ceiling, Leverett began
hammering out the details with Abdullah’s foreign-policy advisor, Adel
Al-Jubeir. When

Ariel Sharon said that a return to the ‘67 borders was
unacceptable, Al-Jubeir said the Saudis didn’t want to be in the

”real
estate business” — if the Palestinians agreed to border modifications,
the Saudis could hardly refuse them. Al-Jubeir

believed he had
something that might actually work.

But the White House wasn’t interested. Sharon already rejected it, Rice

told Leverett.

At the Arab League meeting, Abdullah got every Arab state to sign his proposal in a unanimous vote.

The

White House still wasn’t interested.

Then violence in the Palestinian territories began to increase,
climaxing in an Israeli

siege of Arafat’s compound. In April, Leverett
accompanied Colin Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco to Egypt
and Jordan

and Lebanon and finally Israel. Twice they crossed the
Israeli-army lines to visit Arafat under siege. Powell seemed to think
he

had authorization from the White House to explore what everyone was
calling ”political horizons,” the safely vague shorthand for a

peaceful
future, so on the final day Leverett holed up in a suite at the David
Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of senior

American officials –
the U. . ambassador to Israel, the U. S. consul general to Jerusalem,
assistant secretary of state for Near

Eastern affairs Bill Burns –
trying to hammer out Powell’s last speech.

Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the

phone from the
White House. ”Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a
political horizon,” he said. ”Those are formal

instructions.”

”This is a bad idea,” Leverett remembers saying. ”It’s bad policy
and it’s also humiliating for Powell, who

has been talking to heads of
state about this very issue for the last ten days.”

”It doesn’t matter,” Hadley said. ”There’s

too much resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions.”

So Leverett went back into the suite and asked Powell

to step aside.

Powell was furious, Leverett remembers. ”What is it they’re afraid of?” he demanded. ”Who the hell are they

afraid of?”

”I don’t know sir,” Leverett said.