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After historic talks, US seeks action by Iran
Security in Iraq was the focus of the first US-Iran talks in nearly 30 years on Monday.
from the May 29, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"The talks would not be taking place unless Bush backed them and ... Khamenei backed them," says Juan Cole, an expert on Iraq and Shiite movements at the University of Michigan. "[President Bush] is to the point where he will try anything," he adds, but "it also points to the increased influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice" and the administration's new Iraq team: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his man in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, and Crocker, who recently arrived from Pakistan.
"Khamenei wants new relations with the world, he wants to pursue the dialogue he opened with the West, but he wants this dialogue to produce a new recognition of Iran as a power that must be reckoned with in the region," says Hussain Hafeid, a professor of international relations at Baghdad University. "Sitting down one-on-one with the US," he adds, "is an opportunity to put relations on an equal footing."
No subsequent meeting of the two parties was set after Monday's session, which took place in the offices of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone. The Iraqi government indicated it would extend an invitation to the US and Iran for another discussion in the near future, and Crocker said the US "will entertain it when we receive it."
But this new dialogue for one of the world's most nettlesome relationships will have to overcome at least two significant roadblocks: First, both countries have powerful opponents to any move that could suggest a US-Iran détènte; and the kind of "proof on the ground" of "better behavior" on the part of the Iranians that Crocker says the US wants to see will be difficult to prove.
"Virtually everything Iran is doing in Iraq is highly covert, so it could take months for ... our military to establish whether Iran is fulfilling any promises it might make to cease activities such as gun-running to Shiite militias, moving EFPs across the border," and so on, says Wayne White, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.
EFPs, or Explosively Formed Penetrators, are an especially lethal type of roadside bomb that the Pentagon says is coming into Iraq from Iran and is used by Shiite extremists to target US soldiers.
Just stopping the arrival and use of EFPs in Iraq would be progress for the US. But opponents of the dialogue on the US side, focused in Vice President Dick Cheney's office and a number of conservative Washington think tanks and policy consultants, see bigger reasons to oppose any diplomatic effort toward Iran.
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