White House: No Shoulder-Rubbing with Iranians!

I had to smile when I read Helen Cooper's NY Times story about Zalmay Khalilzad, America's ambassador to the U.N., and former envoy to Kabul and Baghdad.

For years, I've watched when Iranians who favor opening a dialogue with the U.S., including some friends of mine, get vilified by hard-liners back home when they go abroad and rub shoulders with some Americans somewhere.

So now the same thing has happened--in reverse; White House officials, anonymously, are letting it be known that they are "angry" that Khalilzad appeared at a panel in Davos last Saturday sitting beside Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki. No matter that Khalilzad reiterated the Bush administration's policy on Iran's nukes, etc. What next? The White House denouncing Iran as "the Great Satan"?

This is wild speculation on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if Khalilzad may have been engaging in some personal diplomacy here. He apparently did not follow guidelines requiring U.S. diplomats to get prior approval before putting themselves in close proximity to Iranian counterparts. But Khalilzad is used to being a take-charge guy, as our former ambassador to both Afghanistan and Iraq. He also took part in quiet yet approved discussions with Iranian diplomats before the U.S. broke them off in 2003. If Khalilzad was trying to send a signal to Iran that the U.S. is not interested in raising the stakes right now, that would not have been a bad thing. As the "Filipino Monkey" episode in the Gulf earlier this month showed, misunderstandings have the potential to escalate into armed conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Perhaps somebody in the White House didn't want Khalilzad sending that message?

It won't help Khalilzad to get out of any doghouse he's found himself in, but he is an American official who commands a great deal of respect in high circles in Iran. With his experience in the region, and his direct line of communication with Bush--not typical for an ambassador, who normally would deal only with the secretary of state--some Iranians have viewed Khalilzad as the one U.S. official who might be able to engineer a breakthrough in the diplomatic stalemate dating back to the '79 hostage crisis.

Any such hopes are receding, for the moment at least. Last week, Nicholas Burns, the State Department official handling Iranian diplomacy, decided to quit and retire at age 52. Burns, undersecretary for political affairs, the No. 3 position in the department, has done an excellent job of trying to keep diplomatic channels open even while leading U.S. sanctions efforts. That has not been an easy task, with hard-liners running the show in Tehran and powerful figures in the Bush administration like Dick Cheney pressing for the military option. No surprise: when Burns walks out the door, he'll probably take with him any chance that the U.S. will launch a serious dialogue with Iran during Bush's remaining 11 months in office. If Burns thought there was the slightest possibility of a breakthrough, presumably he would have stuck around to help make some diplomatic history. Fortunately, though, Burns is being replaced by an equally solid career diplomat, Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (no relation).

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Burns has to say as a private citizen about how the Bush administration made Iran policy these last seven years. When neo-con John Bolton quit the administration last year, he said one of the reasons was his disagreement with Bush's preference for diplomacy and sanctions--Burns's portfolio--over military force. "The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous," Bolton told the Jerusalem Post. "Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time...We have fiddled away four years."

--By Scott MacLeod/Dubai